Social Contact Data for Infectious Disease Research
A curated repository of social contact survey datasets, standardised metadata,
and tools to support infectious disease transmission modelling and reproducible research.
What is Social Contact Data?
Social contact data describe how people interact with one another in everyday settings. They typically include basic demographic information and details about interactions in different settings such as households, schools, and workplaces. By understanding who interacts with whom, where, how long and how often, these data help researchers understand how close-contact infectious diseases can spread through populations and improve mathematical and epidemiological models used to better characterise transmission dynamics.
This repository brings together standardised datasets from diary-based social contact studies conducted across the globe, making it easier for researchers to access, compare, and analyse patterns of human mixing relevant to infectious disease transmission. For related studies using wearable sensors to capture face-to-face interactions, particularly in more structured or confined settings, see the SocioPatterns initiative.
Source: Mossong et al., PLOS Medicine (2008)
Systematic reviews
A large body of social contact data have been collected across countries and over time. The systematic reviews below provide a broader overview of the available evidence and the studies contributing to our understanding of social contact patterns.
About SOCRATES
The SOcial Contact RATES (SOCRATES) tool enables users to explore and extract information on mixing patterns, including social contact matrices, across countries.
About SOCRATES-CoMix
The SOCRATES-CoMix tool enables users to quickly and conveniently explore and extract information from longitudinal social contact data collected during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic through the CoMix study, across countries and survey waves.
About socialmixr
The socialmixr R package provides tools for working with social contact survey data in R. It includes ready-to-use contact survey datasets, including the POLYMOD data from Mossong et al. (2008), as well as data available through this website. It also provides functions for generating contact matrices for epidemiological analyses and models, allowing you to retrieve and work with the data directly in R.
Data use & licensing
Each dataset is curated while respecting data ownership, licensing requirements, ethical approvals, and applicable data protection regulations. Datasets remain the property of their respective owners and are distributed under their specified licences. When using repository data, please cite both the original publication and the corresponding dataset repository DOI.