A validation study of an Italian language version of the Pain Locus of Control scale (PLOC-It)

摘要

The objective of this study was to prove the construct and predictive validity and the reliability of an Italian (It) version of the Pain Locus of Control scale (PLOC). The scale was translated by a bilingual expert, translated back into English and then revised by Prof. Toomey. The final PLOC-It form underwent the face validation through the judgement of different groups of experts and healthy subjects. On the basis of this process, three items were removed, one for each subscale. The resulting 33-item PLOC-It scale was administered to 99 chronic pain patients. Factor analysis using the same procedure employed in the original study gave a factor structure identical to the one found there. Accordingly, the three factors extracted were labelled Internality, Powerful Other and Chance. The relations of PLOC-It score with measures of pain intensity and quality were also tested, the results were consistent with the theoretical foundations underlying the scale. The ability of the PLOC-It measures to predict the intensity and quality of pain evaluated after the pain treatment program completion were found to be limited to Chance subscale. The reliability estimated with Cronbach alpha coefficients was found to be excellent. We think that the PLOC-It can be introduced in the Italian pain departments for clinical and research applications.