A Cross-cultural Study of the Back Pain Beliefs of Female Undergraduate Healthcare Students

Abstract

Findings of this study highlight the importance of country, education, and LBP experience on back pain beliefs. The more negative back pain beliefs found in Taiwan and Singapore may reflect current pain beliefs and management attitudes.

Psychometric properties and factor structure of the Spanish version of the HC-PAIRS questionnaire

“…Maybe this can explain the low test-retest reliability. The internal consistency was shown to be good (0.83), similar to the 0.78 value in the original version [13] and to the 0.83 in the Dutch version [14] but higher than the 0.72 reported for the Chinese version [15]. Rainville in the English and Houben in the Dutch versions suggested that items 10 and 13 should be deleted as their deletion raised the value of Cronbach's alpha and these two items correlated much less with the other factors.…”

“…In our study the average responses also were trended towards agreement (item 10: 4.77 and item 13: 4.36) but revealed good correlation with the tendency given in the other items. Some studies have found differences in how back pain is faced among different cultural backgrounds by patients [30] and by health care providers [15,16]. For example, Kovacs et al [18] demonstrated that in Spanish LBP patients the influence of fearavoidance beliefs is sparse in disability.…”

“…Houben et al [14] found that the score obtained in the HC-PAIRS correlated significantly with the recommendations about work and activity. The HC-PAIRS has also been used to study the attitudes and beliefs about LBP in physiotherapy students [15,16]. This questionnaire is a useful tool to monitor changes in conceptions and beliefs after a teaching module [17].…”

“…There is evidence which suggests that the beliefs and attitudes about LBP differ according to the cultural background in which they are explored [14][15][16][17][18]. The purpose of this study is to validate the Spanish version of the HC-PAIRS questionnaire and investigate its psychometric properties and factor structure in a sample of Spanish physiotherapy students and family physicians.…”

A comparison of the attitudes toward chronic low back pain in Saudi, Australian and Brazilian physical therapy students

“…A recent study showed that Australian physical therapy students had a total score of 40.2 on HC-PAIRS. 13 Although it was not significant, Burnett et al 17 found a higher HC-PAIRS total score in Singaporean (61.5) and Taiwanese (60.8) compared with Australian (57.8) physical therapy students. Briggs et al 13 found that physical therapy students reported more helpful beliefs than students from other disciplines, namely, chiropractic, medicine, occupational therapy, and pharmacy.…”