Close contacts’ networks visualisation

Follow Up Diary Multiple Contacts

This network image is an example of close contact between people participating in the Optimise Study which covers from the beginning of the project in September 2020 until September 2021.

The network image does not show all people involved in the Optimise Study, but instead focuses on only some of the connections between people. The blue dots are people in the Optimise Study and are participants or other people that participants have contact with. The grey lines represent the close contact between people.

You can see that between some people (i.e. some blue dots) there are many lines between people who interact a lot with one another. In other instances, there is only one connection between people, indicating only one interaction between those people. Then, there are no lines between some people, meaning they do not have contact with one another at all. You can see that some people cluster together in groups, while others only have regular contact with one another person.

It is natural for people to differ in how many others they connect with. Having close contact with others is an important factor for wellbeing and resilience, which is important during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

This Optimise Study network image represents close contact among study participants and also their contacts (September 2020 – September 2021).

The network shows all people involved in the Optimise Study (blue dots) and their connections to others who may also be participants in Optimise (other blue dots) or non-participants (orange dots).

Where there are many grey lines between people (which look like jellyfish shapes) this indicates that there are multiple contacts between these people, and this indicates that such people have frequent close contact. In contrast, we can see some single grey lines only joining people, which indicates one-off interactions between these people. Importantly, we can see that these one-off interactions do connect up a number of people and groups of people in the middle of the network image.