His, hers, or theirs? Hope as a dyadic resource in early parenthood

ABSTRACT

Hope is a mental resource and a robust predictor of well-being, which allows individuals to better cope with hardship. Little is known about dyadic hope – i.e., hope serving as a joint resource within intimate relationships. We examined dyadic hope in a sample of 100 couples in early parenthood, a challenging though common phase in couples’ lives. Three months after becoming parents, both partners completed daily diaries for 3 weeks, reporting their daily hope, stressors, and three types of outcomes: individual, relational, and parental. Using multilevel actor-partner interdependence models, we found that greater hope (both daily and person-level) was positively associated with better actor and partner outcomes of all three kinds. Additionally, hope buffered various daily stressors. Our results show that hope is a personal and shared resource for couples in this pivotal juncture, and thus may constitute a target for future interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Hope
• early parenthood
• transition to parenthood
• actor-partner interdependence model
• daily diary

Acknowledgments

GL is grateful to the Azrieli Foundation for the award of an Azrieli Fellowship supporting his work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2022.2093780.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Materials. The materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2022.2093780.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2022.2093780.

Notes

1. We examined differences between participants who completed all diaries and those who did not in the initial measurements of all variables of interest (i.e., hope, personal stress, relational conflict, parental stress, PPR, PRF, NRF, positive POMS, negative POMS, and CRS) using a series of t-tests. We found no significant differences between the groups (all |t’s|<1.09).

2. Previous studies have found mood to be systematically better on weekends than on weekdays; and couples are more likely to spend time together on weekends which may effect their relational outcomes (Gleason, Iida, Shrout, & Bolger, 2008).

3. In the personal model the random variances of the level-1 interaction effects were non-significant and were not included in the model; random slopes were allowed to correlate. In the relational model the random effects of the level-1 interactions were included in the model; random slopes were allowed to correlate. In the parental model the random effects of the level-1 interactions were included in the model; random slopes were not allowed to correlate due to convergence problems.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation grant [BSF 2013324] awarded to MG and ER. Additional funding was received from John Templeton Foundation and Hope and Optimism Initiative grants to ER.