Reported lack of agreement between self-report pain scores in children may be due to a too strict criterion for agreement

摘要

It is challenging to establish the reliability of a pediatric symptom scale, particularly for measures of subjective symptoms such as pain intensity, which cannot be objectively verified. Numerous strategies have been used in the attempt to establish reliability. Some commonly used strategies are, at best, uninformative, and at worst, misleading. For example, one often sees papers in which evidence for interscale reliability is limited to the correlation between scores on 2 scales.