Adaptation and psychometric properties of Lexington Attachment to Pets Scale: Brazilian version (LAPS-B)

Abstract

Society has increasingly come to appreciate the relationship between people and pets, and therefore, the demand for research into this subject has also been growing. In Brazil, tools designed to assess the human-animal relationship are still scarce, and so far, there is no tool, adapted for the Brazilian context, designed to evaluate the bond between people and their animals. The Lexington Attachment to Pets Scale (LAPS) is a scale that aims to measure the degree of attachment that an owner has for their pet. It is one of the most used tools to assess the emotional bond between people and their animals. The aim of this study, therefore, was to translate, cross-culturally adapt, and evaluate the psychometric properties of the LAPS for the Brazilian population (LAPS-B). For this purpose, confirmatory factor analysis and reliability tests were conducted on a sample of 2526 dog and cat owners from all over the country, of whom 81.87% were female and who had a mean age of 33.85 years old (standard deviation = 12.81). The comparison between the models showed that the 3-factor correlated model and the hierarchical model had better metrics than the others, and that the hierarchical model was the most suitable. In conclusion, the Brazilian version of the LAPS is a reliable measure of the attachment to dogs or cats, and can be used to assist research and studies that address the human-animal relationship. Future research should investigate the psychometric properties of the scale on other animal species.