The nature of hope in hospitalized chronically ill patients

Hope as a universal human phenomenon has been studied from various perspectives often conceptualized as having a unified set of attributes. In this study however hope is viewed to be experienced by people in various patterns structured by different orientations and emphases depending upon their life circumstances. There is a paucity of studies in the literature examining patterns of hope experienced by people in chronic illness or in special life circumstances.

The aim of this study was to discover patterns of hope in hospitalized chronically ill patients and to identify the major threads that structure various patterns of hope experienced by them.

Q-methodology, which is an approach designed to discover patterns in various subjective experiences, was used as the method for data collection and theory generation. Q-methodology involves five steps in its approach, the first two as the first phase and the last three as the second phase. The study was carried out at a general acute-care, tertiary hospital in a New England state in the US. The study obtained data from a convenient sample of 12 chronically ill patients and 16 oncology nurses for the first phase, and a different convenient sample of 20 chronically ill patients for the second phase.

Five patterns of subjective experiences of hope emerged as: (a) externalism orientation, (b) pragmatism orientation, (c) reality orientation, (d) future orientation, and (e) internalism orientation. This means that chronically ill patients experience hope in various ways by focusing on different dimensions of meaning, suggesting the conceptualization of hope as a unitary construct may not reflect people's experiences of hope accurately. The major implication of the study is to rethink ways to assess patients' hope in terms of pattern differences rather than in terms of quantity.