Introduction:

The Health-Promoting Lifestyle Profile-II instrument was developed in English and in Spanish to examine health-promoting lifestyle profiles. Several reports question the validity of its Spanish version; it is thought that the translation employed requires changes according to the cultural context in which it is intended to be used. The proposal was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the six dimensions proposed by the original version of the instrument in Mexican university students.

Method:

Ex post facto design with 478 students from a public university in northeastern Mexico. The analysis was performed in LISREL 8.1 and in SPSS 21.0. A psychometric analysis was performed of the six dimensions with factor homogeneity, validity, and reliability indices in two models.

Results:

Descriptive data and results of the factor analysis are presented with a moderate fit model and a distribution that explains 49.93% of the variance. The 52-item version presented low convergent and discriminant validity values; by removing six items, these values reached normalization for five of the six dimensions. In opposition to that, reliability of the scores was good.

Conclusions:

In this sample from the Mexican context, some problems of the Spanish version's factor solution are confirmed with a model that presents moderate fit given the six-dimension structure. However, the predicted structure shows accepTable reliability values. In the experts' opinion, the six-dimension structure seems to be the most adequate to be used in Mexican university students.

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