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The Good, the Bad, and the Ordinary: The Day-of-the-Week Effect on Mood Across the Globe

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Abstract

The weekly peak of mood has fascinated academics and the mass public alike. However, this phenomenon has not been explored from a global perspective. By analyzing large-scale cross-national survey data collected from the Global Attitude Survey conducted by Pew Research Center in 2014–2015, this paper offers cross-national evidence focusing on reporting a good or bad day across 46 countries. It was found that daily moods show a clear weekly cycle of feeling a “good day” (versus “ordinary” or “bad” day), but whether one is having a “best possible life”, a cognitive evaluation of life conditions this study uses, does not vary over the week. Religion appears to be a key explanatory factor. While Christians are not more likely to report a “good mood” than Muslims or those identifying with other religions, they appear to enjoy a “best possible life”, implying stronger influences by their distinctive worldview and sense of comfort. Also, the percentage of Christians in the whole population constitutes a very important structural context, such that in Christian-majority countries, Saturday and Sunday generated more good day reports than elsewhere. Muslim societies produce a very delightful context on Fridays. Other social structural conditions such as national wealth or income distribution generate mixed evidence. Policy implications are discussed in the conclusion.

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Notes

  1. Surveys were conducted via telephone or face-to-face interviews; in some countries both methods were mixed. Telephone interviews were conducted mainly in N. America, W. Europe, Australia and Japan. The random-digit dialing method was adopted in these areas for both cell and landline phones. In Czech and South Korea, where cell phones are extremely popular (prevalence rate is over 90%), interviews were conducted through cells to solicit answers from a large pool of registered candidates for the survey. Direct interviews were applied in Latin America, E. Europe, Africa and most of Asia, with a multi-stage, cluster design.

  2. For more details of the field report from each participating country, see http://www.pewresearch.org/methodology/international-survey-research/survey-mode-and-sample-design. Either with or without the Ukrainian respondents, the obtained findings are largely the same. They therefore are included in the following analyses.

  3. The ICC is the ratio of the between-cluster variance to the total variance. For categorical results, it is calculated in a slightly different way from that for continuous outcome variables by assuming the variance of residuals to be π2/3 = 3.29. See O’Connell, Goldstein, Rogers and Peng (2008, p. 220).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University for providing research infrastructure and support while I was a visiting scholar and preparing the manuscript of this paper in the second half of 2017.

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  1. Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, 128 Academia Road, Sect. 2, Nankang, Taipei, 11529, Taiwan

    Ming-Chang Tsai

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Correspondence to Ming-Chang Tsai.

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Tsai, MC. The Good, the Bad, and the Ordinary: The Day-of-the-Week Effect on Mood Across the Globe. J Happiness Stud 20, 2101–2124 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-018-0035-7

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