Reliability and validity of the pain observation scale for young children and the visual analogue scale in children with burns

The aim of this study was to assess if the pain observation scale for young children (POCIS) and the visual analogue scale (VAS) are reliable and valid instruments to measure procedural and background pain in burned children aged 0-4 years. Burn care nurses (n = 73) rated pain from 24 fragments of videotaped children during wound care procedures and during periods of rest using the POCIS and the VAS. Intraclass correlations were used to assess inter-rater and intra-rater reliability for the POCIS and the VAS. Internal consistency for POCIS was assessed by Cronbach's alpha. The POCIS has shown poor to moderate inter-rater reliability, moderate to good intra-rater reliability and an acceptable internal consistency. The VAS turned out to have poor inter-rater reliability and poor to moderate intra-rater reliability. Due to poor results of inter-rater reliability in both scales, construct validation is left undone until more acceptable results are obtained. Factors explaining the results are the large number of raters, the manner they were trained and a lack of variation between pain classes in video fragments. Although not all results were satisfying, an easy to use scale as POCIS has promising qualities and deserves further reliability research. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd and ISBI. All rights reserved.