Development of a Questionnaire to Measure Hypervigilance for Visceral Pain

Methods: There are two phases to the project: (1) Development of the pool of items (questions), and (2) validating individual items based on their correlation with an objective gold standard - the response criterion statistic, B, calculated from a barostat test of pain sensitivity. We will perform barostat tests of pain thresholds and other measures of pain sensitivity that are based on sensory decision theory analysis in a relatively large group of 84 IBS patients. Sensory decision theory divides pain perception into two components: a perceptual sensitivity index (P(A)) and a response criterion (B). The response criterion is sensitive to cognitive and psychological influences on pain perception. We will use this index (B) as the gold standard against which to select items for a scale to measure hypervigilance for visceral pain. The process will involve (a) pooling items from existing questionnaires that seem related to the concept, (b) obtaining additional questions from consultants who are experts in visceral perception and psychometric test development, (c) identifying the items that show the strongest correlations with the response criterion, (d using principal components analysis to reduce the items to the smallest number of non-redundant items that predict the response criterion and treating this as a provisional questionnaire of hypervigilance, and (e calculating psychometric characteristics of this questionnaire.