Great, purposeful expectations: predicting daily purposefulness during the COVID-19 response

ABSTRACT

Purposeful living involves planning daily life around personal pursuits. However, it is unclear whether people expect to have more purposeful days than they actually do, and which factors influence discrepancies. A pandemic is a valuable context for examining expectations, as it institutes a less predictable environment. The current studies asked a university (n = 330; M_age = 21.25 years, 77% female) and community (n = 755; M_age = 45.99 years, 89% female) sample to complete seven daily diaries during the first weeks of the COVID-19 response. Each morning, participants reported on how purposeful they expected to be, and each evening, they reported on how purposeful they felt and on daily events. Participants tended to overestimate their daily purposefulness from morning to evening, with students being more discrepant. Higher neuroticism and more stressors (both COVID-related and not) predicted greater discrepancies, while positive events and support provisions were associated with less discrepancy.

KEYWORDS:

• Purpose
• stress
• positive events
• COVID-19
• personality

Data availability

The data that support the findings of the study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest to report.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [430-2019-00387 to N.L.S., 435-2016-1350 to AD] and the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research [SCH-2020-0590 to N.L.S.].