School Reopenings and Human Mobility: Using SafeGraph Data to Analyze COVID-Era Behavior

Understanding the Intersection of Mobility Data and Education Policy
This seminar offers a compelling look at how anonymized mobility data from SafeGraph can be leveraged to assess the real-world impact of school reopening decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The researcher presents a rigorous empirical strategy to examine how returning to in-person education influences broader mobility patterns, such as workplace attendance, retail visits, and residential dwell time. By focusing on U.S. counties with varying school reopening policies, the study isolates causal relationships between schooling mode and human behavior.

Data-Driven Insights on Community Behavior
The presenter explains how SafeGraph’s high-frequency location data provides a valuable lens into the behavioral response of communities. This includes tracking foot traffic at schools, homes, workplaces, and other public venues. These granular insights help quantify how reopening schools affects not just students and teachers, but the broader ecosystem — including parents’ work attendance and shifts in household routines. The analysis reveals that in-person schooling correlates with increased adult mobility, raising important considerations for disease spread.

Methodological Approach and Policy Variation
The study exploits natural variation in school reopening dates and instructional modes — fully remote, hybrid, and fully in-person — to draw inferences using a difference-in-differences framework. The researcher details how policy timelines from state education departments were matched with SafeGraph’s Points of Interest (POI) data to precisely track school-level activity. Careful attention is paid to confounding factors like urbanization, income levels, and existing public health restrictions, strengthening the credibility of the findings.

Policy Implications and Broader Applications
The seminar closes with a discussion on the broader policy implications of mobility data in evaluating education and public health trade-offs. By showing how changes in school operations affect adult behavior, the research underscores the importance of considering externalities in school reopening decisions. The methodology has wider applicability for understanding how institutional changes ripple through society, offering a template for studying other sectors using location-based big data.

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