Social Mobility Data

Publications

In support of research we release our weekly aggregated social mobility data. Each data release includes the current index and longitudinal data for cities, states and the United States. We also have anonymized user level mobility data available upon request. Email Mark Dredze for details.

Our metric is described in our journal publication:
Paiheng Xu, Mark Dredze, David A Broniatowski. The Twitter Social Mobility Index: Measuring Social Distancing Practices from Geolocated Tweets. Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), 2020.

An earlier version of our work can be found in an Arxiv Preprint:
Paiheng Xu, Mark Dredze, David A. Broniatowski. The Twitter Social Mobility Index: Measuring Social Distancing Practices from Geolocated Tweets. arXiv:2004.02397, 2020.

Overall Index Data

The index data file (for each location type) contains the current social mobility index. The columns are:

location The US state, city, or territory and the US as a whole. We include every state, 100 most populous cities in the US, and 2 territories (Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands).
mobility_before_distancing The social mobility index for the entire time period of the dataset, from January 1, 2019 up to the date before social distancing, March 15, 2020.
mobility_after_distancing The social mobility index since March 16, 2020. Note that social distancing started at different times for different states, but we don't the include state-varied analysis.
reduction The percent reduction of social mobility. This is computed as
1 - mobility_after_distancing / mobility_before_distancing.
num_users The number of unique Twitter users in this location that were used to compute the metric.
num_records The number of unique Tweets in this location that were used to compute the metric.

Longitudinal Data with Weekly Measurements

This file contains the social mobility index for every location for each week starting in January 1, 2019. This data is available for every US state, 100 most populated cities, 5 regions (Northeast, Midwest, South, Central, West), and 2 territories (Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands).

Download

Social Mobility Index Paper Social Distancing Paper Archived data