Hope as a Vital Sign in Behavioral Healthcare

Hope is an imperative factor in all areas of life and can act as a vital sign for retention and continuity in many different areas, including academics, the workplace, substance use recovery, and counseling. Current research on the nature of hope has centered around goal orientation and pathway engagement (Snyder et al., 1991). While vital to hope, these two facets of hope's nature do not completely capture or measure the wide scope of the multifaceted concept of hope. Through crowdsourcing and preliminary instrument development, our study defines different levels of hope through six powers: will power, why power, we power, way power, when power, and where power. As participants in our study, students will complete a demographics questionnaire, the Adult Hope Scale, and the Power of Hope Scale, which involves the six proposed powers. The goal of our study is to understand hope practically and to create an instrument that is more effective in defining and measuring the multifaceted concept of hope than the instruments of the past.