Introduction:

a strategy is being developed to promote therapeutic adherence in hypertensive patients in Remedios municipality, Villa Clara which assumes risk perception as a modulating entity; within this framework, it became necessary to build and validate an instrument to measure it.

Objective:

to present the process of the questionnaire construction, as well as the validation of content, criteria, construct, and evaluation of its reliability.

Methods:

the sample used was 444 essential hypertensives from three areas of Remedios. Content validation was done according to experts; criteria validation by Spearman's correlation and construct validation by principal component analysis. Reliability was calculated by Cronbach's Alpha coefficient.

Results:

coefficient of agreement among experts was 0.80 for the criteria: reasonable, understandable and sensitive to variation. This showed that the categories included in the instrument are appropriate. Spearman's Rho statistician was 0.77 with bilateral significance at the level of 0.01, for correlation between therapeutic adherence and risk perception. Multivariate analysis by main components suggested the presence of three dimensions: cognitive-valuable, affective-motivational, and intentional-behavioral. Cronbach's Alpha was 0.82, which confirmed the reliability of the questionnaire.

Conclusions:

the results shown through the validity and reliability tests demonstrated that the questionnaire is an instrument suitable for use and application, according to the objectives pursued in its construction, both for research and for the work of the primary care physician.