The development of a self-report measure to assess the location and intensity of pain in people with intellectual disabilities

The performance of a target group of 20 people with intellectual disability (ID) and a comparison group of 20 people who did not have ID was investiga ted on a series of tasks involving the judgement of the location of pain (o n a bodymap) and the intensity of pain (on an analogue colour scale) in res ponse to a series of photographs of simulated painful experiences. The resu lts of the study indicated that: (I) there were no differences between the target and comparison groups in judging pain location for 93% of test items ; (2) the performance of the target group in judging pain location was stab le over time: (3) people with ID rated the pain images as more intense than the comparison group on all the 'mild' pain stimuli and 36% of the 'severe ' pain stimuli; (4) the performance of the target group in judging pain int ensity was logically consistent for 65% of comparisons (clear trends toward s significance being apparent for a further 10% of items); (5) the performa nce of the target group in judging pain intensity was stable over time: and (6) the performance of the target group was unrelated to indicators of cog nitive ability.