Who’s holding the baby? A prospective diary study of the contact patterns of mothers with an infant
Abstract
Background
Models of infectious disease are increasingly utilising empirical contact data to quantify the number of potentially infectious contacts between age groups. While a growing body of data is being collected on contact patterns across many populations, less attention has been paid to the social contacts of young infants. We collected information on the social contacts of primary carers of young infants and investigated their potential for use as a proxy for contacts made by their infant.
Methods
We recruited primary carers of infants under one year of age residing in two geographically, demographically and socioeconomically distinct local government areas of Melbourne, Australia — Boroondara and Hume — including a sub-group of Turkish-speaking participants. Participants recorded their own contacts in a paper diary and noted whether their infant was present or absent. Information collected included times at an address; description of location; and details on people contacted at the location. Descriptive summary measures and distributions of contacts by location type, intensity, day of contact and by age are reported.
Results
Of the 226 participants recruited, 220 completed diaries were returned. Participant contact patterns were similar across all groups, with respect to the types of locations, intensity and day of contact, with some variation in the number of unique daily contacts. The infant was present at around 85% of locations at which the primary carer contacted other individuals. The majority of contacts occurring when the infant was present were in Own Home (32%), Retail and Hospitality (18%) and Transport (18%) settings. The mean daily number of unique contacts by infants was estimated as 9.1, 8.7 and 6.5 in Boroondara, Hume (English) and Hume (Turkish), respectively, with a similar age distribution across each of our surveyed groups.
Conclusions
Our demonstration that contact patterns of mothers with infants are reasonably robust to socioeconomic and cultural differences is a step forward in modelling infectious disease transmission. With infants spending most of their time in the company of their mother, contact patterns of mothers are a useful proxy measure of infant contact patterns. The age distribution of contacts made by infants estimated in this study may be used to supplement population-wide contact information commonly used in infectious disease transmission models.
Publisher URL: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12879-017-2735-8
DOI: 10.1186/s12879-017-2735-8
Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.
Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.