THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HOPE, MEANINGFULNESS, AND FLOURISHING AMONG SURVIVORS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

Abstract

The current study examines de-identified data from seven California Family Justice Centers. Domestic violence survivors were asked to take a pre-test at intake at any one of the seven Family Justice Centers. They were asked to take a post-test 45 to 60 days after the initial test. The tests were matched and de-identified. There were 125 matched surveys used to quantitatively assess hope and flourishing levels and qualitatively address goal statements authored by survivors in the post-test phase of the research. This study utilized Snyder’s Adult Hope Scale (Snyder, 1991), an 8-item Flourishing Scale (Diener et al., 2010), and the Adverse Childhood Experiences Scale (Felitti et al., 1998) in a Convergent Parallel Mixed Methods Design. The goal statements were coded into categories so that they could be correlated with the individual hope, flourishing and ACE scores of each participant to see if participants with high or low scores on the three quantitative well-being scales correlate with any specific category that his or her goal statement(s) fell into. Data about the frequency of the different topics that the goal statements reflected was also collected. Keywords: survivor defined success, hope, flourishing, goal statements, well-being, ace