ABSTRACT
Information and communication technology plays an important role in the development of contemporary mobilities. Innovation has been rapid, expanding communication networks and increasing overall communication patterns, closely connected to the widespread availability of mobile phones since the last decade of the twentieth century. Nowadays, mobile phones accompany most of us every day and everywhere we go, and they have opened up new possibilities for the investigation of human behaviour. For example, mobile phones and mobile-based electronic questionnaires have become important resources for survey research. The linking of a survey or questions with the location of a telephone is one of the next technological developments in the area, which will make it possible to investigate fundamental questions of human behaviour more precisely and provide focus to applied research. Geographical research performed on the basis of telephone location data can, however, also open up new avenues in the investigation of spatial mobility, and new possibilities will arise thanks to the increasing pervasiveness of mobile phones and the simplicity of information-gathering using this technology. This chapter describes mobile positioning-based research methods. Mobile positioning or the determining of a mobile phone’s location is possible in most mobile networks all over the world. It was originally introduced for the development of Location Based Services (LBS) for mobile-phone users, with the most successful service among them being emergency call positioning, called ‘E911’ in the US or ‘E112’ in Europe. Positioning data can, however, also be used to track the spatial mobility of a person or groups of people (Mountain and Raper 2001; Spinney 2003; Ahas and Mark 2005). This is a very rapidly developing field in geographical and urban studies, and many research institutions and information technology companies are now involved in data-gathering and experiments based on mobile tracking. But there are downsides involved with the introduction of every new technology. Telephones have become such intimate companions for us that the mere knowledge that it is possible for them to be monitored disturbs people. The discovery of a person’s precise location is one of a number of new factors that violate privacy and security (although see Büscher et al., Chapter 8).
