MEASUREMENT OF PESSIMISM IN CHINESE ADOLESCENTS: THE CHINESE HOPELESSNESS SCALE

Abstract

The Chinese version of the Hopelessness Scale (C-HOPE) was administered to 500 Chinese university students, along with other instruments assessing psychiatric symptoms and positive mental health. The C-HOPE was found to have high internal consistency as a scale and factor analysis with a three-factor solution showed that three factors were abstracted from the scale, namely, Hopelessness, Certainty about the Future, and Future Expectation, and these three factors could reliably be reproduced in two random sub-samples. While the C-HOPE was found to correlate significantly with other measures of psychiatric symptoms and positive mental health, it correlated most highly with indices of purpose in life and existential well-being and it was specifically linked to depression rather than to anxiety.