Document Type

Thesis

Comments

Senior Thesis

School of Social and Natural Sciences

Thesis advisor: Dr. Rebecca Distefano

Abstract

Research in resilience science has revealed a “short-list” of protective factors that support positive development in contexts of risk and adversity (Masten, 2014). One such factor is hope, which includes agency thinking (i.e., the belief in one’s ability to accomplish their goals) and pathway thinking (i.e., the ability to produce attainable routes to those goals; Sparks, 2021; Synder, 1997). In families, parents with high levels of hope set intentional parenting goals and encourage their children to create goals as well; these parents also report better psychological functioning and increased ability to cope with parenting stressors (Cole & Molloy, 2023). Although hope has been studied in children, this research has primarily relied on child- or parent-report measures (Berkich, 1995). The current study developed a new measure of child hope using the Five-Minute Speech Sample (FMSS) ⎯ a task in which parents talk about the kind of person their child is for five minutes. The present study had two aims: Describe the presence of child hope among preschoolers experiencing homelessness; And examine associations among parent hope, parenting behaviors, and child hope in families experiencing homelessness. The results of the study demonstrated a significant positive association between positive parenting behaviors (i.e., Problem Solving and Skill Encouragement) and Child Hope. The results also show that the measure of Parent Hope was not associated with any variable related to the study. These results demonstrate promise for the development of interventions within the parent-child dyad that may encourage hope.

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