Content area
Full Text
Abstract:
Hopelessness is central to prominent mental health problems within American Indian (AI) communities. Apaches living on a reservation in Arizona responded to diverse expressions of hope along with Hopelessness, Personal Self-Esteem, and Collective Self-Esteem scales. An Apache Hopefulness Scale expressed five themes of hope and correlated negatively with Hopelessness and positively with both Collective and Personal Self-Esteem. These data confirmed the potential of conducting more extensive analyses of hope within AI tribal life.
Psychological adjustment of the Apache self requires coping resources that address the challenges of tribal life. That these challenges are collective as well as personal seems apparent in the well-documented mental health problems of American Indians (AIs) in general (Barron, Oge, & Markovich, 1999), and of Apaches in particular (May & Van Winkle, 1994). Powerlessness, low self-esteem, and a sense of hopelessness are central to many of these mental health problems, which include depression, suicide, and alcoholism (Trimble, 2000). The Beck Hopelessness Scale (Beck & Steer, 1988) operati onalizes a pessimistic explanatory style that predicts many of these disorders.
Logically, the antidote to hopelessness should be hopefulness. Hope is defined, in part, "by the perception of successful agency related to goals" (Snyder et al., 1991, p. 570). Hopefulness can be learned (Zimmerman, 1990), and an understanding of Apache opportunities to learn hope could be useful in efforts to improve tribal life. Culturally sensitive approaches to counseling, for example, could focus on efforts to develop greater Apache hopefulness (LaFromboise, Trimble, & Mohatt, 1990).
The present proj ect sought to conduct a preliminary assessment hopefulness among Apaches living on a reservation. Tribal life seemed to present five more obvious opportunities for developing a sense of personal agency: family life, education, work, communal involvement, and spirituality. The researchers developed a preliminary Apache Hopefulness Scale that included at least one item expressing each of these five themes. The presumption was that adjustment of the Apache self is a collective as well as a personal process. A valid Apache Hopefulness Scale should therefore correlate predictably not only with the Beck Hopelessness Scale and with Personal Self-Esteem (Rosenberg, 1989), but also with Collective Self-Esteem (Crocker & Luhtanen, 1990). The Collective Self-Esteem Scale measures positive perceptions of the self as a member of the group (Luhtanen...