How Well Do Seven Self-Report Measures Represent Underlying Back Pain Impact?

Area of Science:

• Pain research
• Psychometrics
• Health services research

Background:

• Assessing back pain impact is crucial for pain management studies.
• Understanding the commonality between different pain measures informs their selection and score estimation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To determine if various self-report back pain impact measures reflect a single underlying pain latent variable.
• To estimate the associations between these measures and the latent pain variable.

Main Methods:

• Seven distinct back pain impact measures were administered to 1,874 adults via Amazon Mechanical Turk.
• Measures included Oswestry Disability Index (ODI), Roland-Morris Disability Questionnaire (RMDQ), Örebro Musculoskeletal Pain Questionnaire (OMPQ), STarT Back Tool, Graded Chronic Pain Scale (GCPS), PEG, and Impact Stratification Score (ISS).
• Internal consistency reliability and inter-measure correlations were calculated.

Main Results:

• Reliability estimates ranged from 0.710 (OMPQ) to 0.923 (GCPS).
• Correlations between measures varied from 0.609 (RMDQ/OMPQ) to 0.812 (PEG/GCPS).
• Standardized factor loadings on the pain latent variable were high, ranging from 0.782 (RMDQ) to 0.870 (ISS).

Conclusions:

• The findings support that these diverse back pain measures tap into a common underlying pain construct.
• Scores from one measure can be reliably estimated from others, facilitating flexible research designs.