Internet Intervention for Adolescents With Chronic Pain

Child report of activity limitations will be assessed using the prospective version of the Child Activity Limitations Interview (Palermo, Witherspoon, Valenzuela, & Drotar, 2004), which includes 8 activities that children identify as important in their day-to-day lives that are impacted by pain. Responses are rated on a 5-point scale (0-4) with higher scores indicating greater perceived difficulty with activities. Children will provide ratings daily for 7 days on their online diaries at each assessment period. Mean activity limitations across the reporting period is used in analyses.

Children will report on presence and intensity of pain daily for 7 days at each assessment period. Pain intensity will be assessed using an 11-point numerical rating scale (NRS) with anchors of 0= no pain to 10= worst pain (McGrath et al., 2008). Mean average intensity of the pain reported will serve as primary pain measure.

Children will complete the Bath Adolescent Pain Questionnaire (BAPQ), a 61-item scale that will be used to measure pain-specific emotional functioning (Eccleston et al., 2005). The BAPQ was developed specifically for children with chronic pain and has demonstrated adequate reliability and validity (Eccleston et al., 2008). For the purpose of this study, the subscales of depression and pain-specific anxiety will be used in analyses.

Children and parents will complete this questionnaire, which includes items that address satisfaction with the therapeutic process during the course of treatment and satisfaction with the outcome of therapy. Items are rated on a 5-point scale from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree.

Children and their parents will complete the Adult Responses to Children's Symptoms (ARCS), a 29-item measure assessing parental responses to child pain behavior (Walker, Levy, & Whitehead, 2006). Respondents rate on a five-point Likert scale the frequency with which parents engage in specific behaviors in response to their child's pain.

Children's perception of sleep quality will be measured by the Adolescent Sleep Wake Scale (LeBourgeois et al., 2005), a 28-item self-report scale that assesses five behavioral dimensions of teens' sleep: going to bed, falling asleep, maintaining sleep, reinitiating sleep, and returning to wakefulness. Subscale scores range from 1 to 6, with higher scores indicating better sleep quality.

Parents will complete the Client Service Receipt Inventory-Pain version (Sleed et al., 2005), a measure of service use, out-of-pocket expenses, and lost work time incurred by families for the evaluation or management of the child's chronic pain. Questions pertain to hospital admissions, outpatient services, community services (e.g., tutor, lawyer), medications, lost work time, paid help, and other costs. We will compute the following variables: total number of services used, number of lost parental work days, and number of out-of-pocket expenses.

Parents and adolescents will complete the Helping for Health Inventory (Harris et al., 2008), a 15-item scale that measures miscarried helping or negative social support. Respondents rate on a 5-point scale the frequency with which parents engage in certain behaviors or feel certain ways pertaining to their child's health.