Does Beck's Hopelessness Scale really measure several components?

Much of the interest in hopelessness stems from the key role it plays in the prediction of suicidal behaviour. To measure hopelessness. Beck el al. (1974) developed a 20-item scale (BHS), applied exploratory factor analysis and argued that the scale measures three specific components (affective, motivational and cognitive). Subsequent exploratory factor analyses identified two, three or more factors underlying the scale.

Several confirmatory factor analyses (LISREL) were run on data on 324 suicide attempters in Sweden in order to test the hypothesized factorial structures and to investigate the psychometric properties of the individual items.

Neither three- nor two-factor models fitted the data. A simpler structure was sufficient to account for the observed correlations between most of the items. This led to the development of several variants of a one-factor model, each a combination of affective, motivational and cognitive items. The number of items varied between four and 15.

Our findings suggest that most of the items (15) of Beck's Hopelessness Scale measure one factor. They further suggest that the number of items could considerably be reduced. A four-item scale produced an excellent fit. It includes positive and negative items describing the perception of the future in terms of success, darkness, lack of opportunity and faith. It might even be possible to replace the total scale with one item only, 'my future seems dark to me'.