Longitudinal social contact data analysis: insights from 2 years of data collection in Belgium during the COVID-19 pandemic

Background During the COVID-19 pandemic, the CoMix study, a longitudinal behavioral survey, was designed to monitor social contacts and public awareness in multiple countries, including Belgium. As a longitudinal survey, it is vulnerable to participants'"survey fatigue", which may impact inferences. Methods A negative binomial generalized additive model for location, scale, and shape (NBI GAMLSS) was adopted to estimate the number of contacts reported between age groups and to deal with under-reporting due to fatigue within the study. The dropout process was analyzed with first-order auto-regr... Mehr ...