What does the way you communicate say about you and your household?

Well, that is what academics at Essex are hoping to uncover with a new study into telephone calling behaviour, funded by telecommunications giant BT.

The cross-disciplinary study involves looking at the incoming and outgoing telephone conversations of 400 households around the UK – who they called, who called them, when, how long they spoke for and even at what charge rate.

All numbers are anonymous and all the households agreed to take part in the project, which is looking at three years of call data, involving over 1.7 million separate calls.

The six-month study is exploring correlations between the patterns of telephone calling and the demographics of the households. Each home agreed to fill in a survey every year as part of the project and any changes in call behaviour can be matched with the survey results.

The study is part of on-going research at the University into how social network structures change over time and will allow academics to look at new methods of data analysis, develop new analytical tools and explore the sociological and commercial value of the results.

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Note of Editors

For more information please contact the University Communications Office on 01206 872400 or e-mail: comms@essex.ac.uk.