Hope Assessment and Initial Reliability and Validity Evidence

Hope holds a prominent place in philosophical and theological traditions. While numerous measures of hope are deployed in empirical research, conceptual gaps remain in existing measures, leading to poor construct coverage. To fill this gap, we present a conceptual definition and measure of hope that includes hope that exists precisely amidst difficulty and at the limits of agency. We present evidence for a ten-item Hope Assessment with more philosophical and theological foundations. In addition to conceptual development, we present results from two studies providing empirical evidence of the internal structure, reliability, longitudinal stability, and convergent validity of the Hope Assessment. The hope measure will allow for future research that wants to understand, in particular, how hope operates when one is at the limit of one’s agency.