Hope and personal growth initiative: A comparison of positive, future-oriented constructs

As new measures are added to the increasingly crowded positive psychology field, they must be juxtaposed with existing instruments to assess their relative utility and guide applied psychology researchers and clinicians in choosing appropriate measures. One such new measure is the Personal Growth Initiative Scale (PGIS; Robitschek, 1998). Comparing the PGIS with Synder et al.’s (1991) Hope Scale in a college-student sample (N = 378) with latent variable analyses using LISREL-8 revealed that PGI and hope are distinct yet related constructs (zero order r = 0.65; latent r = 0.84). Both constructs related to a selected set of outcome measures (optimism, psychological distress and well-being) but only hope accounted for a significant proportion of the variance in predicting these outcomes when hope and PGI were entered simultaneously in the model.