Extending the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System Pain Item Banks: Pain Self-Efficacy and Pain Catastrophizing [Methods Study], United States, 2014-2018

Chronic pain, which lasts for months or even years, can disturb people's daily lives and their relationships with others. Doctors want to measure how chronic pain affects people's lives so they can help their patients manage pain.
In this study, the research team wanted to measure two aspects of living with and managing chronic pain:
Pain appraisal describes how people think about their pain. It measures how much people worry about their pain and how well they cope with pain or distract themselves from thinking about it.
Pain-related self-efficacy describes how confident a person is that they can live well with pain.
The research team created two pools of questions, called item banks, to measure each of the two aspects of living with chronic pain. From these larger item banks, the team created and tested brief versions using two and six questions. These brief versions take people less time to finish than the full item banks.