Publication details
The role of perceived hope in harmony in life among Czech and South African adults
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | In view of the globalised nature of today’s world, we aimed to explore whether and to what extent there were differences in levels of perceived hope, positive and negative emotions, as well as harmony in life between two national samples, Czech and South African. Although the Czech Republic (CZ) and South Africa (SA) signifficantly differ in terms of history, culture, language, and socio-economic background, they both experienced recent political and macrosocial changes. We assumed that remaining hopeful might play an important role in attaining subjective well-being despite the perceived socio-political issues in both countries. As the concepts of perceived hope (Krafft et al., 2017) and harmony in life (Kjell et al., 2016) are relatively new, the main aim of this exploratory study was to examine the role of perceived hope and positive and negative affect in the level of harmony in life among Czech and South Africans. Our specific aims were to a) Compare differences in perceived hope, emotional experiences and harmony in life between the CZ and SA samples; b) examine the predictive power of perceived hope in harmony in life and c) investigate the possible mediating role of perceived hope in the relationship between positive affect and harmony in life. We employed data from the international Hope Barometer survey collected between 2016 and 2017. Data were obtained through an online questionnaire and processed using IBM SPSS Statistics. The CZ sample consisted of 310 adults (63.5 % female, mean age = 29.6) while the SA sample consisted of 414 adults (69.6 % female, mean age = 38.9). Perceived hope proved to be an independent predictor of harmony in life in both samples. Further analyses revealed interesting culture-specific differences in the measured variables. We believe that better understanding of cross-cultural similarities and differences in hope and subjective well-being might be useful in understanding and promoting harmony, resilience, and respect for diversity in today’s multicultural society. |