靈性關顧中的「盼望」構念及其本土化的探索——一項量化研究

The Construct of “Hope” in Spiritual Care—An Empirical Exploration of Its Contextualization

Simon Shui-man KWAN

Hope has long been known as a central concept in the Judeo-Christian traditions. Yet, its pastoral counterpart has developed only recently. In contrast, there has been a revival of attention to hope in various fields of study since the 1960s, particularly in the clinical fields. Hope has been variously conceptualized and operationalized. Many measures of hope have been developed in the West, which this paper assumes to be potentially useful for the pastoral care settings. Particularly, this paper attempts to validate one for the non-clinical Chinese, which is a rare effort in the field. It aims to evaluate the psychometric properties of a Chinese version of the Herth Hope Index (CHHI), which is spiritually sensitive, with a non-clinical convenience sample from South China. The data were submitted for confirmatory factor analysis and exploratory factor analysis. Its construct validity and concurrent criterion-related validity were tested. While results indicated that the 3-factor model was more informative, the subscales were found to be different from that of the original HHI. Both its reliability and validity were judged to be acceptable. This paper concludes that the C-HHI as a whole, but not its subscales, is useful in Chinese settings of pastoral care.