Characterizing the mobile phone use patterns of refugee hosting provinces in Turkey

We use coarse-grained mobile phone data from a large Turkish mobile phone provider and cross-reference this data with social media data and a qualitatively composed violent events list to explore the integration of refugees in Turkey. The data provides grounds for fruitful future research. It suggests that border communities with the refugee sending country have much different communications patterns than non-border communities. Additionally, proximity to refugee camps may increase negative sentiment on social media towards refugees, which we suggest may be a proxy for understanding ‘compassion fatigue.’ These findings provide directions for future research on integration. Keywords: Integration, Twitter Sentiment, Syrian Refugees.