The purpose of this proposal is the development of a pediatric pain tool (PPT) for use with school-age children and young adolescents and to measure three salient dimensions of pain: location, intensity, and quality. Such a tool would fill a need for a developmentally appropriate and sensitive instrument (1) to assist in pain assessment and management in clinical settings and (2) to measure pain in research related to pain interventions in children and adolescents. The project will be implemented in three stages. In Stage I, 300 healthy subjects, 8 to 17 years-old will be used to develop the components of the PPT to assess quality and intensity of pain. A list of word pain descriptions will be developed, commonly agreed upon intensity values for each word will be sought and 5 pain intensity scales will be examined to determine which is the most appropriate for use with this age group. In Stage II, 200 children, 8 to 17 years-old, hospitalized and experiencing pain, will be used to evaluate the usefulness of a body outline for assessing location of pain. Finally, in Stage III, the utility, validity and reliability of the PPT will be tested in a clinical setting with sixty children and adolescents experiencing pain resulting from a surgical procedure. A time series design will use one experimental group to be observed once before and 3 to 4 times after a pain producing event. Five hypotheses will be tested.
| Tesler, M D; Holzemer, W L; Savedra, M C (1998) Pain behaviors: postsurgical responses of children and adolescents. J Pediatr Nurs 13:41-7 |
| Savedra, M C; Tesler, M D; Holzemer, W L et al. (1995) A strategy to assess the temporal dimension of pain in children and adolescents. Nurs Res 44:272-6 |
