The purpose of this study was to develop an instrument to measure hope in adults and to evaluate its psychometric properties. A forty item Miller Hope Scale was developed based on the critical elements of hope gleaned from a comprehensive review of literature, including the etymology of hope; as well as from an exploratory study of hope in persons who survived a critical illness. The instrument was critiqued by psychometric and content experts, content validity established and was pretested on 75 subjects. Psychometric properties of the refined instrument were determined by studying 522 healthy adults. The range of scores on the Miller Hope Scale is 40 to 200, with high scores indicating high hope. The mean hope score for the healthy sample was 164.46 with a standard deviation of 17.65. A leptokurtic curve, skewed to the left was noted in these responses. As expected, the instrument detected high hope in individuals who were screened to have no physical or mental health problems. The internal consistency alpha was 0.93 with a two week test-retest reliability of 0.82. Criterion related construct validity was established by correlating the Miller Hope Scale to the Psychological Well-being Scale (r = 0.71), to the Existential Well-being Scale (r = 0.82) and to a one item hope self assessment (r = 0.69). In addition, divergent validity with the Hopelessness Scale was established (= -0.54). Maximum likelihood factor analysis with oblimin rotation resulted in a three factor solution as determined by eigenvalues greater than one, scree test, Lawley's ratio, simple structure, lack of trivial factors and the residual matrix values being less than 0.1. All 40 items had a significant loading (>0.30) on one of the three factors: (I) satisfaction with self, others and life, (II) avoidance of hope threats, and (III) anticipation of a future.
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This dissertation has also been disseminated through the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database. Dissertation/thesis number: 8705572; ProQuest document ID: 303570780. The author still retains copyright.