Pain-coping scale for children and their parents: a cross-sectional study in children with juvenile idiopathic arthritis and other causes of musculoskeletal pain

Abstract Background In a chronic pain-causing disease such as juvenile idiopathic arthritis, the quality of coping with pain is crucial, and parents have a substantial influence on their children’s pain-coping strategies. This study aimed to develop scales for assessing parents’ strategies for coping with their children’s pain and a shorter improved scale for children usable in clinical practice. Methods The number of items in the Finnish version of the pain-coping questionnaire was reduced from 38 to 20. A corresponding scale was created for parental use. We recruited consecutive patients aged 8–16 years who visited a paediatric rheumatology outpatient clinic and reported musculoskeletal pain during the past week. The patients and parents rated the child’s pain on a visual analogue scale from 0 to 100 and completed pain-coping questionnaires and depression inventories. The selection process of pain questionnaire items was performed using factor analyses. Results The study was conducted in nine hospitals evenly distributed throughout Finland. The average (standard deviation) age of the 130 patients was 13.0 (2.3) years; 91 (70%) were girls. Four factors were retained in the new, improved Pain-Coping Scales for children and parents. Both scales had 15 items with 2–5 items/factor. All analytic assumptions of the factor analyses were fulfilled. Conclusions We created a shorter, feasible pain-coping scale for children and a novel scale for caregivers. Both showed good validity and reliability. In clinical work, the pain coping scales may serve as a visualisation of different types of coping resources for paediatric patients with pain and their parents and facilitate the identification of families in need of psychological support.