Design and Analysis of Social Contact Surveys Relevant for the Spread of Infectious Diseases

Abstract

To understand how infections spread through a population, it is crucial to have a correct description of the transmission network. However, it is often impossible to observe transmission of infection directly. To compensate for this lack of direct observations on the structure of the transmission network, we can use information on the social contact network obtained from sociological surveys asking people how frequently they experience at risk events for transmission. We focus on those studies that collect data on at-risk contacts for infection using proxy measures such as having a conversation or touching. There are relatively few approaches to statistical analysis of such social contact data sets. Here we provide an overview of methods used to estimate contact rates by age from social contact data. For two methods we show how this is done using the statistical software R.