Pain-coping strategies in chronic pain patients: Psychometric characteristics of the pain-coping inventory (PCI)

This article presents a series of studies aimed at validating a comprehensive pain-coping inventory (PCI) that is applicable to various types of patients with chronic pain. Item and scale analyses were performed for patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), patients with chronic headache, and pain clinic outpatients. The following 6 scales were derived from a simultaneous component analysis: Pain Transformation, Distraction, Reducing Demands, Retreating, Worrying, and Resting, all of which were internally reliable. A higher order factor analysis grouped the PCI scales into active (transformation, distraction, reducing demands) and passive (retreating, worrying, resting) pain-coping dimensions. Differences in use of strategy found between RA patients and headache patients indicated that the PCI scales were sufficiently sensitive to measure differences between groups. Concurrent validity was assessed for patients with RA and patients with fibromyalgia and predictive validity was assessed for patients with recently diagnosed RA after 1 and 3 years. In both analyses the validity of the scales was supported, in particular the predictive validity of passive coping scales for future outcomes.