Abstract
BACKGROUND: Gratitude is a human strength that promotes well-being; however, it is important to consider culture when constructing scales. OBJECTIVE: To develop and validate a culturally adapted Mexican Gratitude Scale for youth, establishing its psychometric properties: reliability, internal structure, convergent validity, and criterion validity. DESIGN: The participants were 442 Mexican young people with a mean age of 20.81 years from three regions of Mexico. RESULTS: The initial 28-item scale underwent systematic refinement through Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). This psychometric validation process yielded a final 9-item instrument characterized by a robust two-dimensional factorial structure: personal gratitude and emotional gratitude. The CFA results confirmed this structure through excellent model fit indices (CFI = .98; NFI = .97) and demonstrated significant internal consistency for personal gratitude (ω = .89) and emotional gratitude (ω = .88). The scale provided evidence for convergent validity through significant correlations. Personal gratitude showed moderate associations with optimism (r = .40), positive vision (r = .37), affective resources (r = .30), and hope (r = .43), while emotional gratitude exhibited stronger relationships with optimism (r = .54), positive vision (r = .51), affective resources (r = .42), and hope (r = .52). Discriminant validity was evidenced by young people who do not report any type of mental disease scoring higher on gratitude. CONCLUSION: The psychometric properties of the Mexican Gratitude Scale proved to be acceptable, facilitating its use and application in the general and clinical population for future research.