Conceptualizing and Measuring Hope

Abstract

Abstract What is hope, and how can it be measured? These central questions are investigated in the chapter by diving into hope’s properties and structure. As a first step, the author extracts and examines hope’s elemental components, namely, the desire to attain a goal and the belief in the possibility of attaining it. The chapter then scrutinizes existing conceptualizations of hope, especially those introduced in research on hope and conflict, and shows that these conceptualizations fail to capture the two components accurately. Next, the author introduces the bidimensional model of hope, explores its advantages and shortcomings, and offers a novel way to measure hope based on this bidimensional conceptualization. Last, the chapter demonstrates the utility of the bidimensional model of hope in comparing the hopes for peace of citizens trapped in an intractable conflict.