The Children's Hope Scale

University of Kansas News Release:

As a pioneer in the positive-psychology movement, which looks at human strengths instead of weaknesses, University of Kansas professor of clinical psychology, C.R. Snyder said, "I firmly believe that hope keeps us going as a species. It is the link between what we are and the civilized people we will become."

Snyder said he envisions a world where hope is readily nurtured and where people are more caring of one another. Typically, people with high hope are more caring of others, Snyder said.

"Critics have regarded hope as illusory," Snyder said. "Historically people have had some pretty negative views about hope." He paraphrased, for example, a Francis Bacon metaphor: "Hope makes a good breakfast but not much of a dinner."

Yet since 1994 when Snyder's first book, "The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There From Here," was published, he has found a steady appetite for his research. Author or editor of 21 books, Snyder has a total of six books focused on hope, several written with colleagues.

At KU, Snyder works with a team who explore hope and the methods of measuring and using hope in treatment.

"There is a science to hope -- it does have substance. It can be researched," Snyder said. "The key to good science is to define and then measure."

Snyder has done both.

He defines hope as "a way of thinking about goals such that we see ourselves as being able to find routes to our goals (called pathways thinking) and to motivate ourselves to use those routes (called agency thinking)."

Furthermore, he has developed scales to measure hope in adults and children.

Snyder recalled a high school student a few years ago who was searching for help in writing a commencement speech that would offer hope to a graduating class that had experienced several deaths among its classmates.

"I told him sometimes when we lose hope, we must wait for the good to come back," Snyder said.

"Sometimes the best thing to do after a tragedy is to experience 'the down' and to wait. There will be a valley, and eventually hope can come back.

"After people have experienced a tragedy, I advise that they don't try to push into hoping too fast. There is a reason for having bad feelings. If we experience those bad feelings for a time, we then will be able later to bounce back and to hope."

Research shows that people with health problems can find hope in their coping experiences, Snyder said. "They are able to find benefits, become stronger and respect their resilience."

Snyder also found that the grade point average of high-hope college students was almost one-half point higher than that of low-hope students.

How do you train kids to hope? First, teach them to set goals, Snyder said, and not too many, but more than one, because the hopeful are, like smart investors, diversified and flexible.

Goals can ignite willpower, Snyder said. After goals and willpower are established, parents need to coach "waypower": the ability to map various routes to goals, to subdivide the routes into small steps and to block distractions.

"Freshmen might focus on one overriding goal," said Diane S. McDermott, KU associate professor of psychology, who's partnered with Snyder in his research, "like making it through the first year, and then have subgoals like joining a sorority or making an A in a particular class."

Start the hope training early, the two say. After all, adolescence isn't a time of life that's conducive to setting long-term goals.

Interested in fostering hope in your child or student? Check out the Children's Hope Scale. This survey has six questions, answered by a child (age 8-19), to assess "children's dispositional hope." The measure is "based on the premise that children are goal directed and that their goal-related thoughts can be understood according to two components: agency and pathways" (Snyder et al., 1997, p. 400).

Agency is defined as the "ability to initiate and sustain action towards goals" and pathways is defined as the "capacity to find a means to carry out goals."

The instrument is available for free in English and other languages. It is estimated to take about 4 minutes for the child to complete. To download a copy: www.whytry.org/documents/hope_scale.doc

Reference for Hope Scale: Snyder, C. R., Hoza, B., Pelham, W. E., Rapoff, J., Ware, L., Danovsky, M., Highberger, L., Rubinstein, H., & Stahl, K. (1997). The development and validation of the children's hope scale. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 22, 399-421.