Connecting IM Pattern and Selective Perceived Responsiveness to Relationship: A Cluster-Based Approach

Abstract

As people utilize instant messaging (IM) to communicate with people of various relationships, they pay different amounts of attention to and have different communication practices with them of different relationships. However, we haven't seen a close investigation of how users' IM communication patterns relate to different groups of IM contacts. We collected IM logs of 547 sender-recipient pairs from 33 smartphone users over the course of 4 weeks, and used k-mean clustering to identify 6 clusters of these users' IM communication patterns. We illustrate the characteristics of the IM patterns of these distinct clusters as well as how the patterns relate to the relationship between the senders and the recipients within these clusters respectively.