A recently conducted study revealed that people’s communication pattern gets changed when they are unemployed.

A study, co-authored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers was published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Co-author Jameson Toole said in a statement that individuals who are laid off display fewer incoming phone calls, contact less number of people every month, also people they are contacting are different.

The team in their research paper builds a model of cellphone usage that enables the researchers correlate cellphone usage patterns with aggregate changes in employment.

At first they showed that is possible to observe mass layoffs and identify the users affected by them in mobile phone records. Later they tracked the mobility and social interactions of affected workers and observed that job loss has systematic dampening effects on their social and mobility behavior.

The researchers used a plant closing in Europe as the basis for their study. Final analysis of the data showed that in the months after the layoffs, the total number of calls made by laid-off individuals dropped by 51% when compared with working residents, and by 41% compared with all phone users.
Researchers also found that the number of individual cellphone towers needed to transmit the calls of unemployed workers dropped by around 20%.

Co-author David Lazer, a professor at Northeastern University, said, “Using mobile phone data to project economic change would allow almost real-time tracking of the economy, and at very fine spatial granularities...both of which are impossible given current methods of collecting economic statistics”.

Toole said the research can make a methodological impact on unemployment estimates. The team has even presented algorithms capable of identifying employment shocks at the individual, community and societal scales from mobile phone data.