Pain in social context: a systematic review protocol

Pain is an experience that is socially conditioned, like all human experiences. The scientific study of pain from a biopsychosocial perspective involves considering its complexity and multidimensionality. This means accounting for the anatomical and physiological elements of pain, as well as the psychological, social and cultural elements of pain. Despite the increasing acknowledgement of the biopsychosocial model, pain research still lacks standardised criteria for evaluating its social dimension. Moreover, the integration of social variables into empirical studies remains limited and fragmented. The aim of this review protocol is to analyse whether and how pain studies account for the social dimension, understood as the cultural, relational and contextual factors that shape the perception and experience of pain.

A systematic review will be conducted by consulting five international databases: PubMed, Web of Science Core Collection, Scielo Citation Index, Scopus and CINAHL Complete. The review will include empirical or theoretical studies on pain that consider its social dimension, are written in Spanish or English, are applied to human beings and align with the review's objectives. The studies will then be exported to the Zotero bibliographic manager for further processing. The selection of studies will be carried out in two phases. The initial stage of the review process will involve a title and abstract analysis of the identified studies, followed by a full-text review. Data will be extracted using a bespoke tool created for this research. The quality of the studies will be assessed using a tool developed by our research group. Data synthesis will be carried out through descriptive and narrative analyses.

This systematic review protocol did not require ethical approval; however, the project in which it is framed has been approved by the CSIC Ethics Committee (271/2023). These findings will be disseminated by publication in high-impact, peer-reviewed journals and by presentation at relevant scientific conferences and academic congresses. The results will provide an overview of the integration of the social dimension of pain into the scientific literature, thereby contributing to the advancement of the field and informing future research, interventions and public policy.

CRD42024601863.