ABSTRACT
Measuring hope reliably and accurately remains an important research objective, not least in less prosperous settings where ‘holding on to hope’ may be critically important in the struggle against adverse life conditions. The State Hope Scale was designed for use in the US. Despite reported application in diverse cultures and using translations the scale has not been extensively validated outside US populations. This study contributes to a larger project exploring the measurement of hope and provides a critique of Snyder’s scale as used in a Tanzanian female population of 1021 urban microfinance participants. We evaluate the scale’s validity through assessment of the empirical distribution of scores, item response profiles, internal consistency and discriminatory ability. Participants mostly scored very high and many reached very near the maximum attainable score. Hardly any endorsed the negative half of the response scale. Several problems are discussed including poor discrimination and strong evidence of acquiescence response bias. We also found little association of the scale scores with hypothesised correlates of hope. Future improvements on the measurement of hope are recommended, especially in studies outside the narrow Western context in which the scale was devised.
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank all study participants for their time and commitment to the study. We are also grateful to the MAISHA study team for their contribution and tireless dedication to implementing the study in Tanzania and to the administration teams at MITU and LSHTM for their support.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Christian Holm Hansen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5949-0097
Shelley Lees http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0062-7930
Janet Seeley http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0583-5272
Tony Barnett http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9399-9607