An Evaluation of the Texas Functional Living Scale's Latent Structure and Subscales.

OBJECTIVE: Performance-based functional assessment is a critical component of neuropsychological practice. The Texas Functional Living Scale (TFLS) has promise given its brevity, nationally representative norms, and co-norming with Wechsler scales. However, its subscale structure has not been evaluated. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the TFLS in a mixed clinical sample (n = 197).

METHOD: Reliability and convergent and discriminant validity coefficients were calculated with neurocognitive testing and collateral reports and factor analysis was performed.

RESULTS: The Money and Calculation subscale had the best psychometric properties of the subscales. The evidence did not support solitary interpretation of the Time subscale. A three-factor latent structure emerged representing memory and semantic retrieval, performance and visual scanning, and financial calculation.

CONCLUSIONS: This study added psychometric support for interpretation of the TFLS total score and some of its subscales. Study limitations included sample characteristics (e.g., gender ratio) and low power for collateral report analyses.