Csikszentmihalyi essentially said that thresholds relate to Flow. Furthermore, Flow really begins with the social structures. These structures exist in many settings. I identified some of these settings in my first essay in this series and in some of the following essays. One of the most important settings is the psychotherapy office. Therapists help people find the threshold between boredom and anxiety. On the one hand, we can treat therapy like just another conversation with friends—a lot of support but no challenge. On the other hand, we can become highly anxious when engaged in a deeply-penetrating, highly threatening therapy session: “My God, I’ve been shrunk by this horrible, evil person.” How does the therapist and patient find something between boredom and anxiety? More generally, how do any of us find supportive thresholds that enable us to find Hope in confronting the challenges of nothingness and our mid-21st century VUCA-Plus conditions.
Assessment of Hope
In their writing about Hope, Gwinn and Hellman (2022) not only offer an adaptive perspective on Hope but also bring up the issue of assessment. Can Hope be assessed? Gwinn and Hellman claim that Hope can be assessed and even more dramatically claim that it can be measured and offer a Hope Scale for its measurement. I would agree that Hope can be assessed but would differentiate between a measurement of hope (which Gwinn and Hellman provide) and an assessment that provides clarity, understanding and examples of what Hope is and how it impacts our life.
The measurement of Hope requires a quantitative mode of assessment. This measurement is associated with what’s called a Nomothetic Approach to assessment. A nomothetic assessment produces numbers. Many people can be measured regarding a specific phenomenon, with accumulated measurements producing statistics that provide some degree of validity regarding specific magnitudes of the phenomenon being measured. The purpose of nomothetic measurement is to generate general principles, trends, or laws that apply to populations, groups or all people.
By contrast an attempt to provide clarity, understanding and examples of a specific phenomenon is assigned to something called an Ideographic Approach to assessment. An ideographic assessment is usually conducted with individuals. Information is gained through qualitative methods such as interviews, observations, or review of existing documents. The aim of an ideographic assessment is not to attain validity; instead, an emphasis is placed on personal experiences, context, and subjective meaning. An ideographic study is directed to the exploration of human behavioral complexity. The results of a qualitative assessment are often presented not on an Excel spread sheet or on a statistical table presenting levels of significance; they are often presented in case studies, biographies or extended hypothetical narratives based on a composite of actual life events.
While Gwinn and Hellman’s book is presented as a Science of Hope, it contains many case studies—suggesting an ideographic approach to the study of Hope. However, the unique contribution made by this jurist and psychologist is their nomothetic presentation of a tool that can produce an Adaptative Hope score. I propose that Aspirational Hope can also be measured and that an ideographic approach can also be engaged with both Adaptive and Aspirational Hope. I offer a brief description of all four approaches that can be taken.
