[Portuguese version of the Family Environment Scale: application and validation]

To translate the Family Environment Scale into Portuguese and apply the instrument to validate it.

The translation was applied to members of Brazilian families with the aim of evaluating its internal consistency and the concordance between members of the same family. One hundred and fifty-four volunteers living in the city of São Paulo in 2003 who were not receiving any kind of intervention for dealing with family problems were selected. The mean scores in the ten subscales of the instrument were compared between men and women, and between members of the same family. The internal consistency was evaluated by means of Cronbach's alpha.

The maximum possible score in each subscale was nine (good family functioning), except in relation to conflict and control. In most of the subscales, the mean score of the sample studied ranged from 5.1 to 7.6 (men) and 5.4 to 7.7 (women). In the conflict and control subscales, the means ranged from 1.8 to 4.6 (men) and 1.6 to 4.6 (women). These were similar to scores reported in international studies, except for higher scores in the cohesion and organization subscales, and lower score in the conflict subscale. There were no statistically significant differences between the scores attained by men and women. The reliability of the scale, evaluated according to Cronbach's alpha, ranged from 0.61 to 0.78 for the ten subscales.

Cultural factors may have influenced the results obtained in some of the subscales. The Portuguese version of the Family Environment Scale presented reasonable internal consistency that enables its use for evaluating changes in the family's environment and its functioning and after therapeutic interventions.