The Lawton Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL) Scale is an appropriate instrument to assess independent living skills. The IADL Scale was developed to assess more complex activities necessary for functioning in community settings (e.g., shopping, cooking, and managing finances). The capacity to handle these complex functions normally is lost before basic activities of daily living (ADL) (e.g., eating, bathing, toileting) which are measured by ADL scales (i.e., Katz Index of Activities of Daily Living). The IADL instrument is most useful for identifying how a person is functioning at the present time and for identifying improvement or deterioration over time. There are eight domains of function measured with the IADL scale. Assessing IADLs may identify incipient decline in older adults or other individuals who are otherwise capable and healthy. For the ADL instrument, clinicians typically use the tool to detect problems in performing activities of daily living and to plan care accordingly. ADLs are the activities that are fundamental for self care, such as bathing and toileting on one's own. The Index ranks adequacy of performance in the six functions of bathing, dressing, toileting, transferring, continence, and feeding. Clients are scored yes/no for independence in each of the six functions. This resource was identified by the NIH Disaster Research Response Program (DR2) for researchers looking for pre- and post-disaster data collection instruments.