Estimating modern US social contact patterns, the ENGAGED study: a study protocol for a staggered longitudinal cohort study

INTRODUCTION: Accurately capturing social contact data is essential for developing effective mathematical models to forecast disease trends and evaluate interventions. There are limited population-based data of social contacts in the USA which limits our ability to accurately model infectious disease transmission. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: To fill in this gap, we conducted a staggered longitudinal cohort study in metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia, USA. We aimed to characterise contact patterns and examine how they varied by (1) participant demographics, (2) seasonality and (3) self-managed and medically-attended symptoms. Once per month for 6 months, participants reported individual contacts they can name, individual contacts they cannot name and contacts that occurred in group settings. We defined individual contacts as a two-way conversation with five or more words in the physical presence of another person or physical skin-to-skin contact and group contacts as contacts with a group of people with whom participants talked, interacted or shared space. Participants were enrolled on a rolling basis, and data is collected from November 2024 through April 2026. Data analysis will generate age-specific contact matrices using individual contacts and compare contact rates by symptoms. We will also analyse the number and characteristics (eg, indoor/outdoor) of each type of contact. The contact matrices and results will be publicly available for the wider modelling community. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Kaiser Permanente Interregional Institutional Review Board (IRB) reviewed and approved all submitted study documents. An IRB Authorization Agreement was established with the Emory University IRB documenting the roles and responsibilities of each study site. On study completion, de-identified individual level contact data as well as contact matrices and analytical code will be made publicly available on GitHub/Zenodo platform. Study findings will be published in scientific journals and presented at conferences.