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

• Published in: Pain (Amsterdam) Vol. 107; no. 1; pp. 61 - 69
• Main Authors: Stone, Arthur A, Broderick, Joan E, Shiffman, Saul S, Schwartz, Joseph E
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 2004; Elsevier
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Aged; Aged, 80 and over; Agreement; Biological and medical sciences; Comprehension; Computer-Aided Design; Confidence Intervals; Consistency; Diaries; Ecological Momentary Assessment; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Illness and personality; Illness, stress and coping; Male; Medical Records; Mental Recall; Middle Aged; Pain - epidemiology; Pain - psychology; Pain Measurement - methods; Periodicity; Psychology and medicine; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Relief; Reproducibility of Results; Retrospective Studies; Surveys and Questionnaires; Time Factors; Ecological Momentary Assessment; Diaries; Agreement; Relief; Consistency; Human; Chronic; Correlation; Perspective; Pain; Treatment; Memory; Recall
• ISSN: 0304-3959; 1872-6623
• DOI: 10.1016/j.pain.2003.09.020

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.