Adaptation and Validation of the Survey of Pain Attitudes (SOPA-Brief Scale (30 Items)) in Greek

TL;DR

This study adapts and validates a 30-item pain attitudes scale for use in Greek patients with chronic pain.

Contribution

The study provides a validated Greek version of the SOPA-Brief scale for assessing pain-related beliefs in chronic pain patients.

Findings

The Greek SOPA-Brief scale showed acceptable internal reliability with Cronbach’s alpha of 0.773.

Subscales of the SOPA-Brief correlated positively with related scales like PBAPI and CPCI.

Exploratory factor analysis confirmed the original scale structure with 71.54% variance explained.

Abstract

Background: The attitudes and beliefs of patients with chronic pain significantly affect their response to treatment. The Survey of Pain Attitudes (SOPA) scale was developed to identify pain-related beliefs. The aim of the present study was to adapt and validate the short version (30 items) of the Survey of Pain Attitudes in 200 Greek patients living with chronic pain, mainly due to rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases (RMDs). Method: In addition to the SOPA-Brief scale (30 items), the participants completed the Pain Beliefs, Perceptions and Attitudes Inventory (PBAPI) and also the Chronic Pain Coping Inventory (CPCI). Results: Data analysis revealed that the internal reliability coefficient of the scale in the Greek language was Cronbach’s a = 0.773 for the individual items, and for the subscales, it ranged from Cronbach’s a = 0.56 (for the SOPAMedication scale) to Cronbach’s a = 0.78 (for the SOPASolicitude scale). Similarly, the SOPA-Brief subscales in Greek showed positive correlations with subscales of both the PBAPI and the CPCI. Finally, an exploratory factor analysis was performed on the dataset and confirmed the structure of the original scale (Eigenvalues > 1), with 71.54% of variance explained. Conclusions: Overall, the psychometric properties of the short version of the Attitudes Towards Pain Scale (30 items) in Greek show acceptable internal reliability and validity for the scale to be used in daily clinical and research practice.