Paper
Friday, 21 July 2006
This presentation is part of : Research Theory and Methods
Will the Real Pain EXPERT Please Stand Up?: An Emic Answer to an Ontologic Question
Kandyce M. Richards, PhD, APN, School of Nursing, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA
Learning Objective #1: explain why qualitative research methodology is well-suited to the development of pain knowledge.
Learning Objective #2: describe potential contributions of the inductively-derived pain assessment instrument to pain knowledge.
Pain is recognized as a multidimensional, subjective phenomenon that is best understood by the person experiencing it. This necessarily implies that the person with pain, whether in a clinical or research setting, is the most reliable source of information about pain, and should therefore be recognized as the real pain expert. The constructivist paradigm is well-suited as a research methodology for development of pain knowledge, since data that are generated from the emic perspective of the research continuum are grounded in the experiential stories of the research participants. The purpose of this qualitative research study was to determine the sensitivity of items on an inductively-derived pain assessment instrument (previously author-developed for a homogeneous group of postoperative orthopedic pain patients) to the experience of heterogeneous pain in patients representing a variety of pain problems. Focus groups and individual interviews were conducted with thirty-three participants who were experiencing acute, chronic and cancer pain, at which time the relevance of each instrument item to individual pain experiences was discussed between participants and researcher. Comparative analysis of transcribed interview data revealed that all items from the originally constructed instrument were contextually relevant to the experience of pain in this study sample representing a variety of pain problems. Moreover, these data provided contextually-rich descriptions of experiential pain, underscoring recognition of the authentic source of pain as the real pain expert. Study results provide directions for continued development of pain knowledge, including further testing of the pain assessment instrument for purposes of establishing the instrument’s psychometric properties. This may result in an instrument that not only represents the experience of the real pain experts, but also one that will guide pain assessment, subsequently inform a comprehensive plan of care for pain management, and ultimately improve outcomes for patients with pain.

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