Hope and Goal Attainment: Testing a Basic Prediction of Hope Theory

Despite the impressive literature addressing Snyder's (1994) Hope Theory, the theory's basic hypothesis that hope predicts goal attainment has never been tested. We provide a longitudinal test of this prediction among 162 college students. Participants completed measures of hope and goal importance at the beginning of the semester. Three months later, they completed measures of goal attainment and hope again. Results indicate that a goal-specific measure of hope (particularly the agency subscale) predicted goal attainment better than the Hope Scale (Snyder et al., 1991), which measures hope regarding goals in general. The influence of Time 1 goal importance upon Time 2 attainment was largely mediated through goal-specific hope. Moreover, participants appeared to adjust their Time 2 hope levels based on their actual goal attainment.