Validation of the Turkish version of the Brief Pain Inventory in surgery patients

The Brief Pain Inventory (BPI) is a comprehensive instrument for pain assessment and has been validated in several languages. A validated Turkish version has not been available until now. The purpose of this study was to determine the reliability and validity of the BPI for assessing pain in patients undergoing abdominal surgery in Turkey. The sample consisted of 178 patients who underwent abdominal surgery in general surgery and in obstetrics and gynecology clinics of a university hospital in Zmir, Turkey. A demographic questionnaire and the BPI were used to collect data. The content validity was tested by requesting opinions of experts. The structure validity of the scale was evaluated with factor analyses and reliability of the scale with Cronbach alpha and with item-to-total correlations. Two factors with an eigenvalue greater than one were extracted, supporting the validity of two-factor structure of the original BPI. Factor loads of these two factors ranged from 0.55 to 0.91. The Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient was 0.79 for the severity scale and 0.80 for the interference scale. The item-to-total correlations of the scale ranged between 0.42 and 0.69. The Turkish version of the BPI (BPI-Tr) is a reliable and valid instrument for assessing postsurgical pain severity and its interference. The BPI-Tr will be useful for clinical assessment of postsurgical pain in Turkey.