Virtuous Hope Ithemba Project

This project starts with the current psychological research on hope (Snyder, 2002; Rand & Touza, 2021), but expands it into a virtue science framework, looking at how hope benefits others, grows through relationships, and transcends suffering. This project aims to uncover profound truths about the collective and resilient virtue of hope by strengthening support networks, providing respectful mentorship, and creating a shared narrative of hope necessary for communities to flourish. This project will expand an early childhood intervention to study how hope develops and spreads as a virtue among caregivers in a context of hardship and community. Caregivers of young children should be a priority group for virtue development because of their position of influence as well as their vulnerability to loneliness and burnout. Character is understood to be context-specific (Lerner, 2018) and communal (Narvaez, 2008). Thus, strengthening the social fabric is a necessary component of virtue science interventions. This project description outlines the virtue measurement and development of hope, describes the ECD intervention and book development project, and delineates the research methods, analyses, risks, and constraints. Hope cannot be studied in a vacuum, nor can it be divorced from the human drive for the betterment of one’s community. However, the current scientific conceptualization of hope assumes a cognitive-motivational process based on personal experiences. Thus, it does not adequately address hope that transcends circumstances or hope that is communal in nature. The study of hope as a virtue must include hardships, behaviors, and relationships, and it must be both scientifically rigorous and have high external validity. This proposal suggests that, to study hope, we must also invest in a tangible community benefit to track its development, setbacks, and spread. Ithemba is the isiZulu word for hope, and this project defines hope in a South African context. Thus, each time this document refers to the virtue of hope, we will call it ithemba/hope. We label it such to reflect the multi-cultural research process used to develop this definition/measurement. iThemba Projects, in contrast, is the name of the South African partner organization which is collaborating with researchers to study ithemba/hope utilizing and expanding their ECD intervention.