Compare methods

	Katz Index of Independence in Activities of Daily Living	Lawton-Brody Instrumental ADL Scale
Field	Social Gerontology	Nursing
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1963	1969
Originator	Sidney Katz and colleagues at the Benjamin Rose Hospital, Cleveland	M. Powell Lawton
Type	Ordered hierarchical index of basic self-care function	Clinician-rated or interview-based functional assessment
Seminal source	Katz, S., Ford, A. B., Moskowitz, R. W., Jackson, B. A., & Jaffe, M. W. (1963). Studies of illness in the aged. The index of ADL: a standardized measure of biological and psychosocial function. JAMA, 185(12), 914-919.	Lawton, M. P., & Brody, E. M. (1969). Assessment of older people: Self-maintaining and instrumental activities of daily living. Gerontologist, 9(3), 179-186.
Aliases	Katz ADL Index, Index of ADL, Katz Activities of Daily Living Scale, Katz Basic ADL Index	IADL Scale, Lawton IADL, Instrumental Activities of Daily Living
Related	4	3
Summary	The Katz Index of Independence in Activities of Daily Living, introduced by Sidney Katz and colleagues in 1963, is the foundational measure of basic self-care function in older and chronically ill adults. It rates whether a person can perform six fundamental activities — bathing, dressing, toileting, transferring, continence, and feeding — independently or with help, and summarizes them into a single index of functional status. Katz's central empirical observation was that these activities are lost in a consistent order, from the most complex and socially learned (bathing) to the most primitive (feeding), and recovered in the reverse order, so the index reflects an underlying organized process of disability rather than a random list of tasks. Decades after its introduction it remains the reference standard for basic activities of daily living and a building block of geriatric and rehabilitation assessment.	The Lawton-Brody Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL) Scale, developed by M. Powell Lawton and Elaine M. Brody in 1969, measures the capacity to perform complex, higher-order self-care and household tasks necessary for independent community living. The scale assesses eight domains (for women) or five domains (for men): telephone use, shopping, food preparation, housekeeping, laundry, transportation, medication management, and financial management. It complements basic ADL assessment (measured by the Katz Index) and is essential for comprehensive geriatric evaluation.