Theoretical and methodological framework for measuring physical co-presence with mobile positioning databases

Abstract

The objective of current paper is to propose methodological steps for determining the physical co-presence of people using spatio-temporal movement data. Co-presence is the presence of people at the same place at the same time. In spite of the fast developing information and communication technologies the importance of face to face meetings remains high. We assess the probability of people to be at the same place at the same time using passive mobile positioning data with 350 000 randomly selected respondents from Estonia during 10 days in April 2011. We test criteria for finding the best spatial and temporal resolution to discover co-presence from mobile positioning database. Results show that the most suitable space unit for finding co-presence is site of mobile network and time unit is one minute.