What is Hope?

The “In Their Own Words” series features profiles written by members of our 2024-2025 Bass Connections teams that showcase the discoveries, challenges and impact of teams who spent the year tackling real-world problems.

What exactly is hope? We all lean on it – when we face uncertainty, navigate hardships or dream of a different future. But where does it come from and how does it shape our lives?

The What Is Hope? Bridging the Gap Between Lived Experience and Research team aimed to shed light on the lived experience of hope to broaden our scientific understanding of the concept. Team members collected stories of hope from people of varied religious and cultural backgrounds to create a repository of rich qualitative data on hope and its existential and spiritual dimensions.

This team was led by Erin Johnston (Sociology) and Patty Van Cappellen (Social Science Research Institute).

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By: Members of the What Is Hope? Bridging the Gap Between Lived Experience and Research team

Our team explored the lived experience of hope as described by individuals from diverse backgrounds. Aiming to bridge narrow, goal-oriented definitions of hope with broader, multidimensional understandings, we conducted 76 semi-structured interviews using flexible prompts and probes to gather personally meaningful stories of hope.

Speaking to its true interdisciplinary approach, the team heard from guest speakers in Global Health, Psychology, and the Divinity school, and we had help recruiting study participants from Duke’s Interdisciplinary Behavioral Research Center. Our work is part of a larger grant-funded project awarded to Patty Van Cappellen by the John Templeton Foundation.

Why study hope?

This research arises from a crucial need: although hope is widely recognized as a powerful force for resilience, current psychological models reduce it to individual goal pursuit, missing its emotional depth, cultural diversity and spiritual dimensions. This limited lens neglects how people actually experience hope – often relationally and spiritually. By collecting rich, first-person accounts, our team sought to expand and refine the scientific definition of hope to include overlooked aspects.

Building a more inclusive psychological theory of hope has direct implications for supporting clinical care where hope is often central – informing spiritual and community-based interventions and shaping new research on hope as both a personal and communal resource for well-being. In short, this project aimed to re-ground the science of hope in the real lives of those who live it, particularly those navigating hardship and transformation.

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How do people talk about hope?

Drawing on interview narratives, the team integrated experiential insights (bottom-up) with existing psychological frameworks (top-down). By identifying recurring themes and varied expressions of hope, the project contributed to a deeper and more inclusive scientific understanding of hope.

To answer the big question of “what is hope,” we coded and analyzed these stories along three sub-questions. These are just some of the insights we gathered: 

• For what or whom do people hope for? People’s hopes are not just for themselves, but also for others such as family members, social groups and society at large. Our stage in life influences where our hopes lie. For example, younger individuals most often hope for things related to personal growth or identity. Hope for health tends to increase with age, peaking around 65.
• Who ignites and sustains hope? We are often our own greatest sustainers of hope. But hope is also a relational process. Close friends and family, public figures and God (among the religious) can all help fuel our hope by offering support and inspiration. Children also inspire hope by symbolizing the potential for a better future.
• How does hope feel? People describe hope as a positive emotion that brings excitement and even gratitude as we anticipate a better future. However, it is also intertwined with negative emotions such as fear and sadness. Sometimes, hope emerges from sadness and protects us from it. In other cases, feelings of hope and despair fluctuate as we face an uncertain future.

As a team, we followed a qualitative coding protocol and applied more than 50 codes! Our team created this interactive and visual depiction of many of the codes we applied to the stories of hope and example quotes for each. Some of these include:

• Positive feeling of hope: “I think it's like, I guess, enlightening in that you kind of realized, like all of these things are available and open to you. And it's very gratifying, because, like you're seeing that this thing is possible and like somebody took a chance on you.”
• Physical sensation of hope: “All of a sudden, I felt like my body was in God’s embrace. That I was being held by the person who will always love me, no matter what. And the fact that I’m just breathing, that I’m existing, and that I am being cared for in every way that I need to be cared for.”
• Agent of hope: “Talking to people as well, that had gone through that experience... learning from their experiences gave me hope.”

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Together, our team learned:

• The challenges of recruiting hard-to-reach participants – and the profound insights that can emerge from doing so
• How to listen deeply to people’s stories and recognize meaning in everyday experiences
• How to sit with complexity and embrace the ambiguity that often accompanies human experience

One of the most rewarding parts of this project was watching students lean into the messiness of real human experience. They didn’t just collect data points – they listened deeply, sat with hard stories and learned that meaning isn’t always tidy or obvious. That kind of learning doesn’t come from a textbook; it comes from deep, first-hand engagement with the research process. I was truly struck by our students’ curious, critical and caring minds! –Patty Van Capellan, Team Leader

What is next for this project?

This summer marks an exciting next phase for the What Is Hope? project. Members of the team will travel to Tanzania to engage with communities and further explore cross-cultural expressions of hope, deepening the global relevance of our findings.

Back at Duke, Dr. Van Cappellen will continue core grant activities. Undergraduate and graduate students will play a key role in this phase: participating in additional coding of the “Stories of Hope,” generating visualizations of the findings, preparing stories for broader data sharing and presenting at conferences and co-authoring publications.

To culminate this stage of the project, we will host an interdisciplinary scientific meeting at Duke at the end of the fall semester. This convening will bring together scholars and practitioners from psychology, sociology, theology, healthcare and related fields to reflect on our preliminary findings and help co-construct an expanded, phenomenologically grounded definition of hope.

Students involved in the project will have the opportunity to attend and present their work, contributing to a dynamic, collaborative exchange across disciplines and levels of expertise. The meeting will serve as a critical step toward the publication of a target article and future collaborative projects, helping to shape the next chapter in the scientific study of hope.

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Learn More

• Read another student- and faculty-authored team profile from the “In Their Own Words” series.
• Explore current and previous Bass Connections teams.
• Learn about the project team experience through stories from students.