some measures.’’ The informant expresses that she wants a future state of affairs to be realized, a situation where her alcohol problem is solved. She believes it is possible but not given that it may be realized, so this is the expression of a hope according to our definition. No deadline is mentioned, and the expression ‘‘so I must hope there are some mea- sures’’ may indicate that her sense of agency and responsibility for realizing this hope is low, so this is the expression of an indefinite hope. A clinician may regard this as an expression of mere wishful thinking, but that involves a clinical judgment about the impossibility of stopping to drink alcohol without her own active participation. Measured with Snyder’s definition of hope (Snyder, 1994), our informant is only expressing wishful thinking, as Snyder include agency and planning as part of his definition of hope. We find his definition of hope too narrow as we believe it is possible to hope that others will do something or that something will happen without one’s own participation: e.g., I can hope that the sun will be shining tomorrow, even though I am unable to influence the weather. I would regard my hope for sunshine as mere wishful thinking only if I actually thought there was no possibility that the sun will shine tomorrow. This distinction between hope and wishful think- ing is similar to the distinction between sound and false hopes (Farran et al., 1995). Clinicians are often concerned not to encourage false hope or wishful thinking because they are concerned that the person will become disappointed and experience hopeless- ness. This is a valid concern, and it is noteworthy that only one of our informants expressed a clear sense of agency in connection with her description of the act of hoping. However, the expression of indefinite hopes may be seen as a way of protecting oneself from disappointment and hopelessness rather than inviting it. The person chooses to decrease the chance of failure in being unspecific concerning what must happen, when it must hap- pen, or who must see to it that it happens, rather than to increasing the likelihood of fulfillment of the hope by expressing an adequate plan to achieve the goals hoped for. If the clinician is uneasy about encouraging such hopes, it is because he sees the fulfillment of hopes as more valuable than the maintenance of hope itself. Nevertheless, keeping an indefinite hope may also prevent a feeling of hopelessness. Preserving self-worth Above we are close to inferring that the infor- mants express indefinite hopes in order to protect themselves from disappointment. In discussing how Relational hopes to interpret the interviews one is easily led into speculation about what motives the informants may have had for expressing what they did. Such ‘‘read- ing between the lines’’ presupposes theories of communication or psychology. Due to the choice of methodology, our study is not adequate to confirm or disconfirm such theories. Nonetheless we will briefly mention two such theory driven interpretations as they may raise critical questions which may fuel further research. Labov claims that the fundamental cohesion of discourse is not at the level of speech acts but at the more abstract level of interaction where status and role are negotiated (Labov, 1982). If Labov’s theory of communication is right, the informants may have chosen, consciously or not, to describe their hopes in ways that might defend or increase their status in the eyes of the interviewer and themselves. If they perceived threat of a loosing status because of their acts of self-harm, such a defense may have been an urgent need. As we have seen, some of their hopes for life are explicitly about being perceived as respectable. In the light of this, the expression of indefinite hopes may have been motivated by the need to defend status and self-worth. By avoiding agency, the informant may be seen to avoid the blame for an eventual failure. We may also question whether the relational emphasis of their expressed hopes is influenced by such needs to defend their status as respectable persons. A replication of our study with the use of an anonymous questionnaire might indicate whether the emphasis on indefinite and relational hopes may have been influenced by the presence of an interviewer. However, we do not consider the use of anonymous questionnaire to be more objective, as any expression of hope is done with some communicative intention. A psychological theory with special relevance for our study is Baumeister’s (1990) theory of suicide as escape from self. According to Baumeis- ter, suicidal acts are the result of a series of mental moves to escape an interpretation of oneself as a failure. These moves may involve a constricted time perspective, concrete thinking with a focus on immediate movements and sensations, absence of distal goals and an avoidance of high-level inter- pretation of the situation. The consequences of cognitive deconstruction may be disinhibition with respect to irrational acts, evasion of responsibility to avoid implicating or assessing the self, lack of emotion due to the striving to keep emotion out of awareness, fantasy, and irrational thoughts. This theory is helpful in making sense of the expressions about acting impulsively and not thinking about the consequences that we found were expressed by three quarters of our informants. In the Citation: Int J Qualitative Stud Health Well-being 2010, 5: 4651 - DOI: 10.3402/qhw.v5i1.4651 7 (page number not for citation purpose)