A comparison of two pain measures for Asian American cancer patients

Although two of the most commonly used multidimensional pain scales are the McGill Pain Questionnaire-Short Form (MPQ-SF) and the Brief Pain Inventory-Short Form (BPI-SF), there has been little psychometric analysis of these tools used among ethnic minority populations. The purpose of this study was to evaluate and compare psychometric properties of these two pain scales among 119 Asian American cancer patients. The Cronbach's alpha coefficients of the MPQ-SF and the BPI-SF were high (alpha = .85-.97). The correlation coefficients of the item analyses were .12 to .88 for the MPQ-SF and .44 to .90 for the BPI-SF. Two factors were extracted for both instruments. Correlations between pain scores and the usage of pain medications were low for the MPQ-SF (r = .23-.33) and moderate for the BPI-SF (r = .40-.42). The results of this study indicated that, among Asian Americans, both the pain scales were internally consistent; some items in each instrument were redundant; and the BPI-SF is more valid than the MPQ-SF.