DOI: 10.5061/dryad.w6m905qv9
title: The rhythms of transient relationships: Allocating time between weekdays and weekends

description: A fundamental question of any new relationship is, will it last? Transient
 relationships, recently defined by the authors, are an ideal type of
 social tie to explore this question: these relationships are characterized
 by distinguishable starting and ending temporal points, linking the
 question of tie longevity to relationship finite lifetime. In this study,
 we use mobile phone data sets from the UK and Italy to analyze the weekly
 allocation of time invested in maintaining transient relationships. We
 find that more relationships are created during weekdays, with a greater
 proportion of them receiving more contact during these days of the week in
 the long term. The smaller group of relationships that receive more phone
 calls during the weekend tend to remain active for more time. We uncover a
 sorting process by which some ties are moved from weekdays to weekends and
 vice versa, mostly in the first half of the relationship. This process
 also carries more information about the ultimate lifetime of a tie than
 the part of the week when the relationship started, which suggests an
 early evaluation period that leads to a decision on how to allocate time
 to different types of transient ties.
description: # The Rhythms of Transient Relationships: Allocating time between weekdays
 and weekends *** Data and Jupyter notebook with analysis for the
 aforementioned paper ## Description of the data and file structure There
 are four data files * `sourceUK.csv` contains mobile calla data for [a
 study](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2010.08.005) conducted by
 Sam Roberts and Robin Dunbar in the UK. * `sourceIT.csv` contains mobile
 call data for the [MTL
 study](https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0064-6) in Italy. *
 `transientsUK.csv` contains a collection of transient relationships in the
 UK, following the criteria described
 [here](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-32206-2). * `transientsIT.csv`
 contains the information for the transient relationships in Italy. ##
 Variables used All data files use the same names for variables. * `ego`:
 identifier for ego * `alter`: identifier for alter * `pair`: a combination
 of the identifiers for ego and alter * `time`: timestamp for the phone
 call * `DiW`: numerical identifier for the day of the week in which the
 call took place. 0 is Monday and 6 is Sunday * `duration`: duration of the
 phone call in seconds * `t`: counter for the number of days since the
 study started * `a`: ellapsed duration of the relationship. This quantity
 was introduced [in this
 paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-32206-2) * `t0ix`: day
 `t` at which ego made her *first* phone call to alter * `tfix`: day `t` at
 which ego made her *last* phone call to alter * `nix`: number of phone
 calls from ego to alter * `stE`: did the first phone call occurred between
 Saturday and Sunday? `1` for yes, `0` otherwise * `E`: did most of the
 phone call activity between ego and alter occurred between Saturday and
 Sunday? `1` for yes, `0` otherwise * `ell`: lifetime of alter. I. e. the
 number of days between the first and last call to alter. `ell` = `tfix` -
 `t0ix` ## Code/Software There is a `jupyter` notebook for replication
 purposes. It can produce the results found in
 [this](https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.14737) paper.