Psychology ETDs

Mindy McEntee

Publication Date

9-12-2014

Abstract

Chronic pain is a complex condition that can adversely impact all areas of one's life. Despite a wealth of treatment options, complete pain relief is rare. Consequently, treatment goals often aim to improve functioning in physical, psychological, and social domains. Assessments play an important role in planning treatment and monitoring changes in functioning, but must balance comprehensiveness with patient burden. The Sickness Impact Profile (SIP; Bergner, Bobbitt, Carter, & Gilson, 1981) is a well-established general health measure that provides comprehensive clinical information across multiple domains, but remains limited due to its substantial length and questionable factor structure. While several short-form adaptations of the SIP have been developed, these measures are either not suitable for use in chronic pain or sacrifice its broad scope in favor of a greatly reduced number of items. Given the prevalence and difficulty in managing chronic pain, there is still a need for a psychometrically sound, chronic pain-specific measure that provides broad and robust clinical information while minimizing patient burden. The present study conducted a secondary analysis on assessment data of adults with chronic pain (N=723) presenting for treatment at an interdisciplinary rehabilitation program to explore the factor structure of the SIP and develop a short form specifically designed for use in chronic pain (SIP for Chronic Pain, SIP-CP). Items on each of the 12 original SIP subscales were evaluated for inclusion in the SIP-CP using a 2-PL item response theory (IRT) model, in which items were removed individually with subsequent evaluation of the model using multiple indices of fit. The final 42-item SIP-CP demonstrated acceptable convergent and divergent validity and was able to account for a similar amount of the variance in a number of relevant clinical characteristics as both the original SIP and a non-pain-specific shortened version, the SIP68. The SIP-CP is a psychometrically supported form of the SIP that appears to provide similarly robust clinical information with substantially reduced burden in patients seeking treatment for chronic pain.

Degree Name

Psychology

Level of Degree

Masters

Department Name

Psychology

First Committee Member (Chair)

Vowles, Kevin

Second Committee Member

Witkiewitz, Katie

Third Committee Member

Smith, Bruce

Language

English

Keywords

chronic pain, assessment, quality of life

Document Type

Thesis

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