Objective:

The population of older adults in the world grows and being aware of their health helps to improve their living conditions, functional independence through the ability to do basic daily activities is a good indicator to know the health and need of medical care. One of the most used scales for this is the Barthel Index, so the purpose of this work was to validate this scale psychometrically, to identify if its structure is the most appropriate through confirmatory factorial analysis.

Materials and methods:

Two older adult samples from CDMX participated, 200 to study psychometric properties and 276 for confirmatory factor analysis.

Results:

A structure with ten items, adequate reliability in the coefficients of pure internal consistency Alpha Ordinal [Alpha=0.98, CI95% (0.96- 0.98)] and Omega Ordinal [Omega=0.99 CI95% (0.96-0.99)], and correct fit [χ2(35) = 49.28, p=.06, CFI=0.99, RMSEA=0.03 (95% CI 0,.06)].

Conclusions:

The Barthel index in self-report has psychometric properties that make it a reliable and valid measure for the purpose of evaluating functional independence in the geriatric population of Mexico City.

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