Evaluation of the Dispositional Hope Scale in injury survivors
Introduction
Hope, in its everyday understanding, is an expectation of good in the future. In recent decades, hope as a psychological construct has come under increasing scrutiny by researchers interested to understand its links to psychosocial well-being (Valle, Huebner, & Suldo, 2006). One of the best elaborated and investigated theories of hope was developed by Snyder (2002) who conceptualised it as a trait-like cognitive construct encompassing affirmative beliefs about one’s ability to accomplish personal goals.
Snyder’s formulation of hope comprises two related constructs which he deemed Pathways and Agency. The Pathways component refers to an individual’s perceived means or routes available to achieve goals. People with high Pathways beliefs have the ability to generate possible means of attaining desired goals, can easily identify multiple viable routes to reach their goals, and find alternative routes when their initial strategies fail. Agency is described as the belief in one’s ability to succeed in using Pathways to realise desired aims. High Agency is characterised by determination, motivation and energy directed toward meeting one’s goals.
While the hope construct defined by Snyder shares some features with other constructs such as optimism and self-efficacy there are a number of studies that support the discriminant validity of hope (e.g., Luthans et al., 2007, Magaletta and Oliver, 1999). For example, while hope and self-efficacy are both concerned with beliefs about expected success, they differ in that self-efficacy does not explicitly include the Pathways component to the success that hope does (Peterson & Byron, 2008). Similarly, while hope and optimism are associated with positive expectations, the focus of the expectations differs. The positive expectation associated with hope are specifically directed toward goal attainment where as the expectation associated with optimism is more general expectation of positive events (Snyder, 2000).
There is a growing body of evidence supporting the notion that hope functions to drive adaptive behaviour. It has been positively associated with behavioural outcomes including coping and problem solving (Bellizzi and Blank, 2006, Chang, 2003), academic and athletic performance (Ciarrochi, Heaven, & Davies, 2007), and higher job performance (Peterson & Byron, 2008). Studies that have found that higher hope is related to better adjustment to serious illness and other traumatic life events (Arnau et al., 2006, Chang, 2003, Ong et al., 2006) suggest it may contribute to resilience in the face of hardship.
According to Snyder and his colleagues hope, like other trait cognitive constructs, begins developing early in life. They propose that Pathways thinking comes first as the infant learns the temporal relations between its actions and outcomes. Then, as the understanding of self emerges, the recognition of self as an agent – and thus Agency – can develop. Hope beliefs are then strengthened, or otherwise, by personal experience. The capacity to cope successfully with what Snyder refers to as surprise events (Snyder, 2002) is thought to be dependent on the individual’s pre-event levels of hope – high hope people are better equipped to find means by which to overcome their difficulties (Pathways) – and the confidence to exercise these coping strategies (Agency). Negotiating a threatening event successfully could then strengthen hope while a failure to cope well could weaken hope beliefs. Currently there is little evidence to support hypotheses linking prior trauma with current levels of hope.
To measure hope, Snyder and colleagues developed the Dispositional Hope Scale (DHS) (Snyder et al., 1991). Of the scale’s eight items, four assess Pathways and four assess Agency. The authors contend that all eight items can be summed to produce a total hope score, mirroring their model of hope as a higher-order latent construct consisting of the Agency and Pathways beliefs. Several factor analytic studies have supported the hypothesised scale structure of two first-order factors of Agency and Pathways (Babyak et al., 1993, Magaletta and Oliver, 1999, Roesch and Vaughn, 2006) although others have not yielded clean solutions (Ahmed and Duhamel, 1994, Steed, 2002). To date, validation studies of the DHS have all used undergraduate student samples, with the exception of Snyder et al. who included a sub-set of participants undergoing a psychological intervention. In view of the increasing use of the DHS in a wide range of populations, there is a clear need to validate the scale in non-student samples. As hope has been posited as a source of resilience in adjustment to adverse life events, an examination of the scale’s utility in a community sample who have experienced traumatic event will be particularly valuable.
Accordingly, the first aim of this study was to validate the DHS using confirmatory factor analysis in group of people who had recently experienced a traumatic event. The second aim of the study was to examine associations between hope beliefs and a number of demographic factors age, gender, marital status, education and employment status. The third aim was to explore the association between hope beliefs and a history of traumatic life events. We expected there would be an inverse relationship between experience of traumatic events and current levels of Agency and Pathways beliefs, and that any effects would be moderated by age of first occurrence and type of event. We expected that events which first occurred in childhood would be associated with lower levels of hope, while those which first occurred in adulthood would be much less likely to impact hope.
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were patients who had been admitted a trauma service in one of five hospitals across Australia for treatment following a traumatic injury (April 2005–February 2007). Patients were invited to participate if they met the following inclusion criteria: (i) aged between 16 and 70; (ii) experienced either no brain injury or a mild brain injury; and (iii) had a reasonable comprehension of English. Individuals were excluded from the study if they had moderate or severe head injury or were
Results
The descriptives of the DHS are presented in Table 1. The mean scores for Agency, Pathways and total scores were generally high. The Agency and Pathways subscales displayed a strong positive correlation, r(1025) = .69, p < .005. The total scale showed a high level of internal consistency (Cronbach α = .88), as did the two subscales (Agency = .81; Pathways = .80).
Discussion
In this traumatic injury sample, the DHS demonstrated sound psychometric properties, with a high level of internal consistency for both subscales and for total hope. The CFA results provide support for the two-factor structure of Snyder’s model of hope in this population, with all items loading on the Agency and Pathways factors as expected. Further, the differential relationship between the Agency and Pathways scores and prior childhood traumatic experience adds weight to the proposition that
Acknowledgments
This study was supported by a Victorian Trauma Foundation general grant, (V49), a National Health and Medical Research Council Australian Clinical Research Fellowship (359284), and a National Health and Medical Research Council Program Grant (300304). The authors gratefully acknowledge all the participants involved in this study.
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