When this happens, it is the responsibility of the clinician to help the parties find an acceptable compromise. These patterns are called “family hope constellations” (Murphy, 1991), and they can cause conflict within families and with therapeutic goals. How one’s family views hope-and the values, beliefs, and strategies they use to maintain it-have an impact on how and for what an individual hopes. The way a person hopes develops within a particular family culture and with a set of life experiences. While hope is unique and individualistic, hope is embedded in a social context. In actuality, hope differs from person to person and from family to family. To the untrained eye, hope may appear fairly uniform, and people believe that everyone hopes like they hope. On a personal level, we each have our own definition of hope, but we may not fully understand the concept as it applies to others. These instruments identify critical components of hope and provide direction for clinical interventions and future research. They also have developed formal assessment measures, such as the Nowotny Hope Scale in nursing (Nowotny, 1991) and hope measurement scales in psychology (Snyder, 2002). Other helping professions, especially psychology and nursing (Herth, 2001 Lopez & Snyder, 2009), have higher levels of training in using hope clinically. They also emphasized that we need to examine the role hope plays in our educational programs, as well as the agencies in which social workers practice. They challenged the assumption that social workers use hope effectively when working with older adults and encouraged incorporating hope-inducing models into clinical practice. Similarly, a decade ago, Koenig & Spano (2006) looked at the use of hope in gerontological social work. He developed a practical framework for assessing and enhancing a patient’s hope with special attention to identifying sources of hope, distinguishing hope from denial, and using hope to change maladaptive behaviors. Almost 30 years ago, oncology social worker David Callan (1989) described the value of hope in the counseling process. Not to be discounted, though, is the groundbreaking work of individual social workers who have been using hope clinically in their practices. Several other major and important works, such as the Oxford Textbook of Palliative Care Social Work (Altilio & Otis-Green, 2011) and the Handbook of Oncology Social Work (Christ, Messner, & Behar, 2015), each have fewer than half a dozen references to “hope” in their almost 800-page volumes. Surprisingly, we have no entry for “hope” in the Encyclopedia of Social Work (Franklin, 2016) or the Social Work Dictionary (Barker, 2014). Yet, as indicated above, it provides the framework that underlies most of our interventions. It is understudied and is rarely taught as a therapeutic asset in our classrooms.
We learn and discuss the importance of empowerment, resiliency, the strengths perspective, and advocacy, but hope is often overlooked as a resource. We rarely define it, assess it, measure it, research it, or use it as a clinical tool. While we recognize the power of hope in a general way, perhaps we have not paid enough attention to hope as a concept in our field. It is this activism that sets social work apart from other helping professionals. Equally important is that social workers combine hope with human rights, social justice, and advocacy. It is a testimony to the importance of hope for our clients, our communities, and our nation (Clark & Hoffler, 2014).
Called Hope Matters, this collection of case studies spans the continuum of hope from the individual to society. In 2012, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) held an annual conference with the theme of “Restoring Hope: The Power of Social Work.” After the conference, 58 social work experts wrote essays that described examples of hope in their practices. Without hope, without a belief that positive change is possible, the profession would cease to exist. Regardless of the reason for entering the field, social workers come to the profession with an essential hopefulness. Some see social work more as a calling than a career choice. Certainly, most of us want to make a difference in the world. It is, after all, the profession that works with marginalized, disadvantaged, and even devalued populations-what President Lyndon Johnson in his War on Poverty called people who live in “the outskirts of hope.” Many factors contribute to the decision to become a social worker. Few would dispute that social work is the profession of hope.
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