Footprints by Phone Calls: Where, How, and Why?

After exploring general telecommunication patterns (e.g., Refugee Caller Diversity) of refugees and natives in Turkey, we became interetsed in potentially reasoning research questions exclusively related with refugee caller individuals: Where are the locations that each refugee caller have ever placed calls to either Turkish natives or to other refugees? How were these locations connected and evolved over time? How are the telecommunication patterns like for those refugee callers displaying high levels of social integration? Are there any factors we can use to explain these phenomena? The map below opened the gate of knowledge to explore the questions above. For making this map, 1) a refugee caller's activity space was defined as 1000-meter (10 minutes walking) buffers around all the base station locations that a caller had ever placed calls at; all the 1000-meter buffers of the same callers were then dissolved into one activity space polygon in order to avoid double-counting the areas of activity spaces; 2) For the same refugee caller, each of their recorded locations of calls was connected based on the sequence of time that each relevant call was placed; as a result, this generated possible travel trajectory for each refugee caller; 3) level of social integration for a refugee caller was defined as the percentage of calls that the refugee placed to Turkish natives over the total calls the refugee placed across all the base stations where his/ her calls were recorded; such measure, in the map below, is represented by the classified colors and it is not location-sensitive.

Figure1: Refugee individual activity spaces and trajectories from 1/1/17 to 12/31/17 ↑.