Measuring hope amongst Tanzanian women who participate in microfinance: An evaluation of the Snyder hope scale

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Snyder state hope scale
• acquiescence response bias
• scale validity
• ceiling effect

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

Additional information

Funding

MAISHA is supported by the STRIVE Research Programme Consortium funded by UK Aid from the Department for International Development (DFID) and another donor, who wishes to remain anonymous. The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect the Department’s official policies. The funding bodies and sponsor have had no role in the design of the study or in writing this manuscript, and will not have any role in its conduct, analyses and interpretation of data, or decisions to disseminate the results. CH is supported by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the UK Department for International Development (DFID) under the MRC/DFID Concordat agreement, which is also part of the EDCTP2 programme supported by the European Union [grant ref: MR/R010161/1].