Will cell phone usage be a new method in improving and tracking real time unemployment statistics?
In a published report in May 2015, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, by researchers at MIT, Northeastern and Harvard, together they conducted an experiment to see if cell phone usage could correlate to unemployment trends in a more real time and accurate way. Current methods of tracking unemployment by the government sometimes can not catch real time data or may not include every single person who is unemployed or employed. The researchers worked on this study to prove that cell phone usage could be another method to help track the unemployment and employment trends in a more current time and precise method.
In 2006, the researchers created a formula with a set of rules and compared these to 1,100 workers who had been laid off due to a factory shut down in a European town. The population of the town was about 15,000. The researchers used the information about the recently laid off workers and created a method in which they linked the cell phone use in the area to those workers. The researchers then found that the 1,100 workers who had been let go and were newly unemployed, made 51% less phone calls than people in the town who were still employed. Five percent less phone calls were made by the jobless workers separately. The researchers then conducted this theory for 8 quarters in 52 provinces in a country in Europe. They used data from the European Labor Force Surveys and examined it with cell phone usage, finding that the results are similar to that of the European town experiment.
The researchers believe that given this positively tested theory, this could help track unemployment trends two to eight weeks faster than the existing methods. The researchers do not want to change the current methods with this but they believe it would help track more real time unemployment trends. David Lazer, a professor at Northeastern University and a co writer of the report stated to MIT News, “Using mobile phone data to project economic change would allow almost real time tracking of the economy, and at very fine spatial granularities…both of which are impossible given current methods of collecting economic statistics.” With the high level of technology that we have seen born over the last decade, it would not be surprising if this type of method started being used by the government to track unemployment trends to have more accurate data in a faster way.
Melissa Bennett - HR Administrative Assistant