Measuring of Hope in the Philippines

We, Filipino people are known for being resilient but to what extent we can be in terms
of being hopeful? Hope or Pag-asa in Tagalog has been part of our life in general. We tend to
dream what we wanted in life, to vie for the goals we wanted to achieve. This will be start of
our hopes to achieve our goals and dreams in our life.
Every individual has different goals and dreams. If you were to ask me what will be my
goals and dreams, I would say that my goal is to finish my Master’s Degree, pass the Board
exam for Psychologist. As for my dreams, I wanted to have my own house, my own family and
to make my parents settle here in the Philippines and have their own business rather than
worked overseas. My high hopes will lead me to achieve those, I know, with hard work and
perseverance; I for one believe that I will get it in the right time.
In a dictionary, hope is the positive cognitions regarding an individual’s expectation and
ability to attain important goals in life with correlating to one’s will and commitment.
The Reading: Measuring Hope in the Philippines: Validating the Short Version of the
Locus-of-Hope Scale in Filipino, tackles on what other external factors are present on how an
individual hope for something. Also, how a person can be affected by his/her family and
environment when it comes in hoping to achieve one’s goals. The study focuses on creating a
test or scale that will be beneficial to Filipino people on measuring Locus of Hope Scale. We
know that some Filipinos are getting hard to pick up or understand English as a second
language.
In hopes of measuring hope in the Filipino set-up, the authors have come up to create a
scale that will be beneficial and understandable to people who have low levels of education,
translated it to a language that they will fully understand. It is a 20 item scale, with four locus-
of hope subscale that focuses on thoughts associated with some strategies to attain important
goals in life. The four subscales are as follows: (internal, external-family, external-peers, and
external-spiritual). The participants of the survey are adults.
They wanted to see if there are positive correlation with external factors and the well-
being indicators such as Optimism, Self-Esteem, and Life Satisfaction.
The result shows that only family has the positive predictor with the well-being
indicators. We, Filipinos are known for having closed-family ties. We always strive harder for
our family. We always include them in our decision making and goals in life. If we want to
achieve something, we include them on our success.
Peers on the other hand, it is a negative predictor with the well-being indicators, maybe
because we didn’t have that strong connection than what we have with our families. Yes, they
are there supporting you, giving advices but we all know that not all are rooting for your
success 100%. Not all your friends are your friends. For the Spiritual, it only predicts positively
in optimism, which means that our faith in our Lord only gives us a positive outlook and hopes
in life. We are still depending on ourselves to achieve it.

To sum it up, the scale that was translated is still a work in progress. It still needs to
establish a broader scale that will cater and understand other facets of Filipino’s Hope.
Differences is somehow one of the example why it may or maybe correlates to well-being. It is
still a good thing that Filipino Psychologists are translating and developing a scale that will cater
the capacity of the Filipinos to understand what they are answering.