Understanding recall of weekly pain from a momentary assessment perspective: absolute agreement, between- and within-person consistency, and judged change in weekly pain

Pain. 2004 Jan;107(1-2):61-9. doi: 10.1016/j.pain.2003.09.020.

Abstract

To better understand the association between pain recalled over a previous week and the average of multiple momentary reports of pain taken during the same period, 68 patients with chronic pain completed both weekly recall and momentary reports over a 2-week period and assessed their change in pain over the 2 weeks. Pearson correlations and intraclass correlation coefficients were computed to index three different ways of comparing the measures on both a between-person and within-person basis. Between-person correspondence between weekly and momentary reports was generally moderate to high, but within-person correspondence was low. Judged change was only weakly related to changes over a week computed from weekly recall or from average momentary reports. Given the importance of within-person change for treatment studies, these results indicate a serious nonequivalence in weekly recall and averaged momentary reports of pain.

Publication types

  • Comparative Study

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Adult
  • Aged
  • Aged, 80 and over
  • Comprehension*
  • Computer-Aided Design
  • Confidence Intervals
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Medical Records
  • Mental Recall*
  • Middle Aged
  • Pain / epidemiology
  • Pain / psychology*
  • Pain Measurement / methods*
  • Periodicity*
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Retrospective Studies
  • Surveys and Questionnaires
  • Time Factors