An investigation of language used by children to describe discomfort during dental pulp‐testing

Abstract

To assess children's experience of pain (1) they need to be presented with a list of words like the ones in this study, (2) the numbers of words chosen by them would represent the severity of pain, and (3) those numbers need to be adjusted for the children's reading comprehension and age.

The impact of dental caries on children and young people: what they have to say?

“…Children in these studies have been able to discuss their knowledge and understanding of their condition, the limitations their illness places on their lives, their emotions, and their role in self‐care. Children have also been found to be able to describe their pain experiences; however, the language children used was different to that used by adults. Thus, the overall aim of this study was to give children the opportunity to describe the impact of dental caries on their daily lives.…”

Sensory and affective components of pain as recorded with the Pain‐O‐Meter (POM) among children with acute and chronic pain

“…Results from another study have shown that children with good reading comprehension choose fewer words when experiencing discomfort. One possible reason, according to Toole, may be that they are less inclined to choose unfamiliar words [22].…”

An investigation of language used by children to describe discomfort expected and experienced during dental treatment

“…There have been many attempts to develop valid observational measures [11] and means to allow children to report pain [12,13]. However, these have only recently been tested in dentistry for children [14]. Toole et al .…”

“…Toole et al . [14] showed that the oldest children gave the greatest estimates, on adjectival measures, of severity of pain during dental pulp testing. On the other hand, when chronological age was controlled statistically, the children with the least well‐developed linguistic comprehension, according to a standard psychometric test, were shown to give the most severe representations of discomfort.…”

“…The authors had expected that those children would give the lowest estimates because they would have the smallest vocabularies and least understanding of the task. However, the above study [14] suggested that children appear to be more selective in their choice of words for experimentally manipulated pain as their linguistic development improves. Nevertheless, as they grow older, they would have more experience of operative pain, and therefore, have more pain words to describe it.…”