Written by Travis Roberts, Senior Program Research Specialist, World Vision
World Vision is fundamentally in the business of hope — defined here as the combination of resilience, agency, and a forward-looking belief that change is possible, all of which are critical to sustaining development outcomes.
All our work is rooted in and contributes to the contagious conviction that genuine flourishing will outlast suffering, that the way things are is not the way things will always be. And though we pursue this goal through a variety of sectoral work (including food security and livelihoods, WASH, child protection, and health work), those sectors are ultimately in service of something greater.
If a community we work with is healthier and more economically prosperous, but not more hopeful, we’re obviously failing at some level. And we believe that the more hopeful a community is, the better able it will be to take advantage of development opportunities and sustain lasting change into the future.
Accepting that hope is so central to our work means we must measure it rigorously. If we measure well, we can ensure our programming enriches participants’ lives and spends donors’ dollars wisely. Get it wrong, and we’re at risk of wasting time and money, or even causing harm.
As a research specialist with World Vision for the past five years, much of my work has been directly concerned with measuring vital concepts that are often perceived as unmeasurable. Key to this work is a partnership-wide effort, alongside the Human Flourishing Center at Harvard University, Baylor University, Duke University, and Gallup, to transform the way we conceptualize and measure hope. It is our desire that this work will fully leverage our Christian identity, faith-based approaches, and technical excellence to help the most vulnerable children flourish and demonstrate our quality to donors, no matter their worldview or perspective.
Defining hope
In August 2023, World Vision convened a diverse group of theologians, practitioners, and researchers in Sarajevo — our task was to evaluate and revise our current child well-being outcomes, including one focused on hope. What emerged from those initial conversations was the realization that we weren’t all talking about the same concept of hope, and neither was the development community writ large.
When many organizations define and measure hope, the focus is on optimism. Can they help participants say that they hope to see higher yields in the coming years or hope to receive crucial household assets like cookstoves or bikes? Others think in terms of aspiration — can they shape a vision of the future that families and communities can hope will come to pass, if they make the right investments and devote enough energy? Some focus on confidence, helping individuals hope that they can address challenges that come their way as they build their personal capacities and resources.
Optimism, aspiration, and confidence are all integral to the work we do at World Vision and the mission of ending extreme poverty. But each is also incomplete on its own. As a Christian organization, we believe these dimensions point toward an even deeper understanding of hope — one that builds on optimism, aspiration, and confidence, while also drawing attention to the beliefs and relationships that sustain hope over time and across circumstances. This deeper understanding has tangible, measurable implications for the communities we serve.
Hope, in this deeper sense, is not formed in isolation — it is shaped by the beliefs and relationships that give meaning to people’s lives. Across many communities, those beliefs are inseparable from faith traditions that inform how people understand purpose, respond to adversity, and relate to others. In fact, with over 80% of the world’s population identifying with a religious tradition, faith plays a central role in shaping social norms, behaviors, and responses to hardship.
World Vision’s experience across diverse contexts reinforces a critical insight: understanding and measuring hope requires engaging with these relational and belief-based foundations, not only the individual attitudes that express them.
Optimistic, aspirational, and confident hope all rely on specific short-term outcomes or individual capacity and can be strained when faced with calamities or shocks that alter circumstances or reduce capacity. That’s why World Vision is focused on nurturing a deeper, more eternal kind of hope. The Christian conception of hope is firmly rooted in the eternal. It is a “an experience of God’s love,” and “an essential conviction that, despite the harsh realities and disappointments of the world, good will ultimately triumph over evil.”¹
We believe that while this hope is most fully experienced through the Christian faith, the loving nature of God is expressed in the world to all people and mediated through genuine expressions of love in human relationships. This, in turn, results in outward signs of hope: resilience, joy, wisdom, purpose, and personal faith.
In partnership with the Human Flourishing Center at Harvard University, Baylor University, Duke University, and Gallup, we have created and tested a robust measurement tool that accurately measures these concepts: the Hope & Love Measure.
From concept to measurement: A new tool for hope
At its core, the Hope & Love Measure reflects a conviction that theology and rigorous social science don’t need to exist in separate spheres. In fact, bringing them together helps us understand what has often remained difficult to identify and measure in both faith and development spaces. From the beginning, this work has been about moving beyond abstract language and toward something we can observe and test. Rather than treating hope as an internal mindset alone, it captures how hope is expressed in the daily lives of children. What the measure does is make that visibility possible in a consistent and disciplined way.
This becomes clearer in the multidimensional design of the tool itself. The tool moves beyond asking if a child feels hopeful in a general sense and identifies six observable signs — compassion, joy, purpose, resilience, wisdom, and personal faith — that together form a more complete picture of flourishing. Each dimension points to patterns of behavior and perception that are visible, trackable, and shaped by relationships within families and communities. They show up in how children treat others, how they engage their communities, and how they navigate challenges. Taken together, they provide a way to analyze how relational environments shape outcomes over time and to adjust programming accordingly. In this sense, the tool goes beyond defining hope — it clarifies how it functions and how it endures.
What makes this meaningful for our work is that it allows us to get closer to something development efforts often miss: it makes it possible to measure a driver of change, not just its outcomes. We’re very good at measuring what’s already happened — whether a program improved health, increased income, or expanded access to education. But those outcomes don’t always tell us why change lasts in some contexts and fades in others. By capturing how children experience being loved, valued, supported, and able to navigate adversity, this measure begins to surface those underlying dynamics. It provides a way to ask what made that change possible — and whether it’s likely to endure.
And that has implications for the broader development community, opening a more integrated understanding of impact. The measure offers a practical way to incorporate social, emotional, and spiritual dimensions into monitoring and evaluation without sacrificing rigor. In doing so, it strengthens the case that durable progress depends not only on access to services and resources, but also on the internal and relational capacities that enable individuals to use those resources effectively. By making these dimensions measurable, the tool contributes to a more complete evidence base for what drives resilience, agency, and sustained change — bringing us a step closer to understanding what truly sustains change in the communities we serve.
From measurement to action
The indicator generated by this measure has been adopted globally by World Vision offices, and we look forward to having an ever-increasing dataset on the impact our programs have on hope, particularly for children. Beyond this, we also look forward to using the tool as a component in our ongoing research on faith and child flourishing. This research will examine the crucial role faith and faith communities have in generating and sustaining hope in children.
An increasing internal body of evidence on interventions like Celebrating Families or Empowered Worldview shows that our faith-based models have profound impacts on children’s hope and flourishing. This directly aligns with findings from the Human Flourishing Project, concerning how childhood engagement in faith communities has a lifelong impact in every domain of human flourishing. World Vision’s engagement with these communities, and the values we share, equip us to deliver interventions that no one else can. And our theological and scientific understanding of hope, and how to measure it, can help us demonstrate that impact.
It’s an exciting time to be working in the field of hope. New research is continually examining the dynamics of hope throughout contexts affected by poverty, conflict, and fragility. Policymakers are beginning to realize the practical impact that focusing on hope can have on the problems they’re trying to solve.
And this week, dozens of researchers, policymakers, and donors are convening in Rome to discuss hope and child flourishing. In a time when the field of international development is facing unprecedented challenges, it is comforting to know that so much is being done to help the people we work for to take hold of hope in ways that can help sustain them through the most complex challenges. In doing so, we are seeking not only to measure hope more accurately, but to better understand how it is formed, sustained, and expressed across contexts.
[1] Gideon, R., Davy, T., Lim-Tam, R., Marsic, S., Foster, J., Amenyedzi, S., Cruz, L., Kraft, K. Theological Statement: Signs of Hope Where World Vision Works. August 2024.
