Towards a New Conceptualization of Hope in Italy: Cultural Adaptation and Validation of the Perceived Hope Scale (PHS) and Its Implications for Young Adults’ Mental Health

The construct of hope has long been a subject of interest in psychological research, given its effect on well-being and mental health and its relevance in specific life stages, such as young adulthood. Hope has been conceptualized in various ways, leading to the development of different measurement instruments. The Perceived Hope Scale (PHS) is a recently developed six-item instrument that, in line with new systemic and transdisciplinary theoretical perspectives, assesses perceived hope in a direct, general, and theoretically neutral manner. This paper presents the cultural adaptation and Italian validation of the PHS using two distinct samples of young adults aged 18 to 30. Study I, conducted with a sample of 200 participants (M = 22.50, SD = 2.62), preliminarily explored the latent structure of the PHS through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and assessed some of its psychometric properties. Additionally, an independent sample of 405 young adults (M = 22.40, SD = 2.51) was recruited for Study II, which reports the results of the Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). Consistent with the original version of the instrument, findings support a first-order factorial structure with excellent fit indices. Furthermore, the study examines the measurement invariance of the PHS across gender and religious beliefs, as well as the scale’s internal consistency and its convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. In addition to confirming the robustness of the PHS, our results highlight the protective role of perceived hope in young adults’ mental health, paving the way for new research directions and intervention trajectories.