Children's and adolescents' pain language in Spanish: translation of a measure

The decision to include a Spanish-speaking sample in a study of pain in children with leukemia necessitated translation of the data collection tools. Therefore, the Adolescent Pediatric Pain Tool (APPT) was translated by using the standard translation, back-translation procedure. The Spanish word list consists of 66 descriptors in the sensory, affective, evaluative, and temporal domains. After initial pilot work with the translated APPT with well children in the Dominican Republic, additional pilot work was conducted in California. Two of these studies were completed with well children and adolescents, and one study that was part of a clinical research project focused on pain in children and adolescents with leukemia. Although content; construct, concurrent validity; and test-retest reliability were tested, further studies are necessary with larger populations of children and adolescents. This series of pilot studies supports the usefulness of the Spanish translation of the APPT word list, particularly for clinical or research situations in which multiple versions of a tool would counteract ease of use.