Hope

November 28, 2006
Hope has many dimensions. Some would say it is what one has when all else is lost. What one has when the odds are low. However, others (Snyder) would say that hope is a more deliberate, cognitive process. A process that requires structures and strategies and that is present before all else is lost. Having hope serves as “preventative medicine” for this disadvantaged population, helping them to foresee barriers and challenges that could stand in their way and prevent them from achieving their goals.

Snyder’s Hope Theory details three necessary components to hope. These cognitive elements of this spiritual construct help to delineate how it actually influences one’s outcomes. First, one must have goals. These are plans for the future. Goals can be immediate (short term) or they can be long term. They are one’s wishes for what one will achieve and they can encompass a variety of areas of one’s life. Second, one must employ pathway thinking. Pathway thinking is the ability to see a route to achieving a goal. This is the plan for accomplishing what one sets out to do. Another critical piece of pathway thinking for hopeful people is that they are able to generate multiple pathways to reaching a desired goal and that they are not limited by just one. Finally, there must be agency to achieve one’s goals. This requires the motivation to set out on a delineated pathway and to persevere until a goal is met. Agency is critical to achieving goals, for without it the actual achievement will not occur.

Unfortunately, hope theory is not directly congruent with the findings of this study. What these data suggest is that it may be a combination of both perspectives. Hope, for these rural poor youth, seems to be both cognitive and emotional. Perhaps what is happening is that one must have the cognitive structures that hope theory suggests initially. It is with these cognitive structures, that they are able to see opportunity and take advantage of it. But these alone would not be called “hope” in our everyday world; we might just call it motivation or drive. When faced with challenges, this is when hope becomes that emotional or spiritual construct. One does truly have hope when all else is lost, but without those initial cognitive structures, it may not be what makes him successful. It is the emotional dynamic that makes them engage in more pathway thinking and explore alternative pathways when one does not work out. It is this same emotional dynamic that motivates and gives agency to them to pursue those pathways. Clearly, this sample exemplifies this because they have demonstrated their pathway and agency thinking by taking action to join a program like Upward Bound. This affirms the notion that given an opportunity, they will take advantage of it, driven by the hope that it will help them to reach their goals.