Abstract number: A-1021-0087-01414

THE NORWEGIAN INJUSTICE EXPERIENCE QUESTIONNAIRE: TRANSLATION AND VALIDATION THROUGH INTERVIEWS AND REGISTRY DATA 

Background and aims: Experience of injustice may negatively affect trajectories in patients with chronic pain by prolonging rehabilitation and increasing pain severity. Injustice also predicts pain-related disability and emotional distress. Patients with chronic pain may experience injustice due to undeserved and unnecessary suffering, and irreparable losses in terms of impaired physical and psychosocial function. The Injustice Experience Questionnaire (IEQ) measures the degree of perceived injustice in patients with pain after injury. However, the understanding of injustice may differ among patient groups and cultures.  Therefore, we aimed to translate the IEQ to Norwegian, and test its’ reliability and validity in patients with chronic pain conditions.

Methods: A forward-back-translation, cultural adaptation and linguistic validation procedure was used to translate the questionnaire from English to Norwegian. Individual and group interviews were used to explore the patients’ perception of the questionnaire. Registry data from the Oslo Pain Registry was used to investigate scale reliability (internal consistency), criterion and construct validity of the IEQ.

Results: Sixteen patients participated in the interviews. In general, the items were easy to understand and relevant to the feeling of injustice. Data from 2779 patients showed that IEQ had high correlations with similar constructs such as pain catastrophizing (r = 0.71) and psychological distress (r = 0.61)(p< 0.001). Internal consistency of items were high (Chronbach’s Alpa = 0.922). A principal component analysis suggested a one-factor structure.

Conclusions: The Norwegian version of the questionnaire is a reliable and valid tool to measure experienced injustice in patients with chronic pain conditions.