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Adult Dispositional Hope Scale

AHS
psychologyeducationsocial sciencesFree for research use

Permission: Free for research use. Free for non-commercial academic research, with no license fee. Cite the original publication.

A 12-item measure of dispositional hope (8 scored items plus 4 fillers) comprising agency (goal-directed determination) and pathways, the perceived ability to plan routes to goals.

Items
12
Response format
4-point Likert in the original; 8-point in many later administrations
Version
1.0
Subscales
2

Ready-to-cite methods sentence

Dispositional hope was measured with the Adult Hope Scale (Snyder et al., 1991), whose 8 scored items across the agency and pathways subscales showed acceptable to good internal consistency (total-scale α = .74 to .84 across the original samples).

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Reliability & validation

Validation population
College students and people in psychological treatment (Snyder et al., 1991)
Test–retest
0.73–0.85
Cronbach's α
0.74–0.84

Subscales

AgencyPathways

Response anchors

Definitely false · Mostly false · Mostly true · Definitely true

Known limitations

Only 8 of the 12 items are scored; the two 4-item subscales are highly correlated and less reliable alone than the total, and response formats differ across published versions (4- vs 8-point).

Original citation

Snyder, C. R., Harris, C., Anderson, J. R., Holleran, S. A., Irving, L. M., Sigmon, S. T., Yoshinobu, L., Gibb, J., Langelle, C., & Harney, P. (1991). The will and the ways: Development and validation of an individual-differences measure of hope. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(4), 570-585.

https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.60.4.570

Questions researchers ask

What does the AHS measure?

A 12-item measure of dispositional hope (8 scored items plus 4 fillers) comprising agency (goal-directed determination) and pathways, the perceived ability to plan routes to goals.

How many items does the AHS have?

The Adult Dispositional Hope Scale (AHS) has 12 items across 2 subscales: Agency, Pathways.

Is the AHS free to use?

The AHS is free to use for non-commercial academic research. You don't need to pay a license fee, but you should always cite the original publication.

Is the AHS reliable?

Validation studies report Cronbach's α of 0.74–0.84, test–retest reliability of 0.73–0.85. See the reliability section for the population studied and full statistics.

Who developed the AHS, and how do I cite it?

Snyder, C. R., Harris, C., Anderson, J. R., Holleran, S. A., Irving, L. M., Sigmon, S. T., Yoshinobu, L., Gibb, J., Langelle, C., & Harney, P. (1991). The will and the ways: Development and validation of an individual-differences measure of hope. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(4), 570-585. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.60.4.570

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Library entry verified September 2026. Metadata is provided for reference. Questionnaires are built in Folio Surveyor, subject to each instrument's licensing, and can be taken to Qualtrics, Google Forms or Microsoft Forms, with their CSV responses brought back for scoring.