Everyday Hope Indicators: A Novel Approach to Understanding Hope in Kenya

• In Event: Strategies for Improving Data Quality and Micro-qualitative Research

Abstract

Fostering hope is an important aspect of democratic societies and scholarship suggests that doing so can build trust, political agency, and civic engagement among the populus (Stitzlein, 2020). Yet, “hope” is an intangible concept, making it difficult to understand and measure. Moreover, studies that aim to “measure” hope often stem from liberal democracies, rather than emerging democracies, though an understanding of hope in such contexts is perhaps more important than ever in an age of democratic backsliding. In this paper, we describe a potential avenue through which researchers may harness innovative qualitative research techniques to gain a more nuanced understanding of terms such as “hope” in research in such contexts. We also showcase how such novel techniques can build on findings from quantitative studies in emerging democracies.

We explore these ideas using the case of Kenya, an emerging democracy with a history of interethnic tensions after colonization. Moreover, Freedom House International notes that while the country holds regular multiparty elections, there is pervasive corruption, with human rights defenders vulnerable to restrictive laws and intimidation, ranking it as only “partially free”. Kenya has a comparatively large youth population (aged 18-35). The country thus offers a novel setting in which to explore the relationships between hope and democratization for youth.

We leverage two concepts to explore Kenyan youths’ conceptions of hope. First, the broader study this paper derives from examines conceptions of hope using the Snyder Hope Scale – looking at hope as a “goal-setting framework” (Snyder et al., 1991) that includes measures of agency, trust, and sense of belonging. This scale is commonly used to measure hope, especially in developed contexts such as the United States, though recent studies call for improvements to the measurement of hope, especially outside of Western contexts (Holm Hansen et al., 2019). In an effort to address this, we draw on aspects of the Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI) methodology (Mac Ginty, 2013), an innovative qualitative participatory research and evaluation approach, to explore and validate our methods for measuring hope. As with EPI, we ask people how they observe and understand a complex social concept — in our case, hope rather than peace— to develop a conceptualization that resonates in their environment.

This paper explores aspects of the EPI framework in an analysis of seven focus groups (group size ranged from 5 to 12) with youth in Kenya (n = 61), that we conducted in January 2020. Participants in the focus group discussions were Kenyan youth who had either just achieved or just missed the cut-off grade on the mandatory national exams for university entrance, a key moment where hope is expected to increase or decrease. The groups consisted of either exclusively those who did not meet the cut-off, and thus were unable to attend university, or those who just barely achieved the cut-off grade and were in university – an ostensibly important milestone for promoting or dashing youth hope in Kenya (see: Burde and King, 2023). In line with EPI methodology, we asked youth participants to provide examples of hope and describe their own indicators of how hope manifests (or not) in their own lives and in what they observe in their social context.

We found that, while many conceptions of hope tend to focus on psychological and individual aspects of hope as in the most commonly used quantitative scales, many of our participants described a contextualized understanding of hope that dwells within (and often in spite of) the social and political barriers to their self-actualization. While not incompatible with the Snyder Hope Scale, our participants’ views of hope complicate its notion of goal setting, in particular. We also compare these findings to initial cognitive interviews we conducted before deploying the hope scale as a survey instrument.

Our analysis of focus groups drawing on the EPI framework helps us shed light on key findings from a larger project consisting of a regression discontinuity design looking at the causal effects of higher education access on hope in Kenya where we analyzed quantitative changes in hope over three years based on access to university, or lack thereof. In this paper, we show that leveraging aspects of the EPI process can help us understand the different manifestations of hope (and hopelessness) among youth in an emerging democracy such as Kenya. Such a novel application of the EPI methodology to flesh out results from the broader study builds on the strengths of a participant-centered approach to the conception of terms that are embedded in Western scholarship for research in such developing contexts. In emerging democracies such as Kenya, understanding how youth conceptualize hope in their daily lives has implications for the role of education in promoting and strengthening democracy against retrenchment.

Authors

• Emily Dunlop, Cornell University

• Amanda Renee Blewitt, University of North Carolina Greensboro

• Elisabeth King, New York University

• Dana Burde, New York University

• Daphna Harel, New York University

• Jennifer Hill, New York University