Social Fluidity in Children's Face-to-Face Interaction Networks

During free play, children decide with which peers they want to spend their time. The distribution of time and social effort amongst their peers can be indicative for the inclusivity of the group. In this appraisal paper, we explore a recently introduced measure to estimate social mixing in groups, called social fluidity. We estimate social fluidity for 27 data sets of children's face-to-face interaction networks collected during playtime breaks and discuss how this measure can be used by field experts to characterize group behavior as well as individual behavior. We therefore draft a step-by-step plan to analyze proximity data based on the behavioral model and the social fluidity measure introduced by Colman et al.