Hope as the will and the ways: what Snyder's Hope Scale measures

Think of a goal that matters to you, then imagine that the obvious route to it closes. Some people stop there. Others start listing alternatives before they have finished being annoyed. The psychologist C. R. Snyder spent much of his career on the difference between these two reactions, and he called the second one hope.

Will and ways

In 1991 Snyder and colleagues published a paper titled "The will and the ways", together with a short questionnaire, the Adult Hope Scale. In their definition hope has two parts. Agency is the will, the sense that you can start moving toward a goal and keep going. Pathways are the ways, the ability to think of routes to a goal, including new ones when the first route is blocked.

Both parts are needed. Strong will with only one route ends in frustration when that route closes. Many routes with no drive to take any of them ends in plans that stay on paper.

What our test asks

Our hope test (Snyder's Hope Scale) uses the eight scored items of Snyder's scale, four for each part, and gives you a separate score for agency and for pathways. A pathways item reads "There are lots of ways around any problem". Agency items include "I energetically pursue my goals" and "I meet the goals that I set for myself".

We changed three things. The original has four filler items that are not scored, and we left them out. The original asks how true each statement is, from definitely false to definitely true, while ours uses a five-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. And one item is slightly reworded, from getting "out of a jam" to getting "out of a difficult situation". Because of these changes, your scores may not match published norms exactly.

Hope is not optimism

In 1985 Michael Scheier and Charles Carver described dispositional optimism as a general expectation that things will turn out well. Hope in Snyder's sense is narrower and more active. An optimist expects a good outcome. A hopeful person also sees how they could bring it about.

The two tend to go together, but you can score high on one and only moderate on the other. Someone may expect life to work out because they trust luck or the people around them, without seeing many routes of their own.

What hope predicts

In 2002 Snyder and colleagues followed students through college for six years. Students with higher hope scores at the start had better grades and were more likely to graduate, even after their entrance exam scores were taken into account.

A study like this cannot show that hope causes better results. Some of the link may run the other way, because earlier success makes people feel capable. Agency items such as "I have been pretty successful in life" partly measure past success directly, so a hard year can lower your agency score without saying much about what you can do next.

Reading your two scores

Look first at which part is lower. Low agency with high pathways often fits someone who sees options but feels worn out. Rest, smaller steps and a goal that you care about may help more than further planning. Low pathways with high agency fits someone who works hard on one plan and stalls when it fails. Breaking the goal into steps and writing down a second route before you need it gives pathways something to work with. If both scores are low and you have also felt low in mood for weeks, consider talking to a doctor or psychologist.

To compare hope with general expectations about the future, take the optimism test (LOT-R) and read whether optimism can be learned. For the belief that you can handle what comes, which is close to agency, try the General Self-Efficacy Scale.