Dr Ben Anderson, Department of Sociology, University of Essex and ESRC Sustainable Practices Research Group
Dr Alexei Vernitski, Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Essex
Dr David Hunter, School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex
2nd February 2012
At 16:00 in Room 6.345.
Social practices have come to the fore in recent studies as a way to emphasise the habitual, embedded, normative and often unconscious nature of consumption. Empirically social practices have tended to be studied using mainly qualitative methods with occasional forays into time-use and purchasing diaries or data.
In this paper we draw on a unique dataset linking a longitudinal household panel survey with household call records over three years to try to explore the social practices of communication for different kinds of people in different kinds of households.
We will discuss results relating to the size and nature of personal contact groups (ego-networks) and the frequency with which different members are contacted . We will also discuss an experiment in attempting to identify ‘batch’ and ‘grapevine’ calling practices (call sequences) that were previously reported in a qualitative study of the same households and will discuss some of the different temporal patterns this reveals.
Finally, we will highlight some of the intricacies and difficulties of linking ‘traditional’ longitudinal panel survey data with fine grained ‘traces’ from administrative/commercial data.
