Ethnographic methodologic assessment of pain perceptions by verbal description.

This study was designed to use known anthropologic methods to gather and analyze qualitative data about verbal descriptors of pain among 25 Chinese, and 60 Western subjects (25 Anglo-Americans and 35 Scandinavians). The sample consisted of 54 patients and 31 dentists. Key pain descriptors from each cultural context were selected for construction of pain assessment instruments which allowed multidimensional statistical techniques to translate these data into cross-cultural quantitative indices. Results revealed dimensions of pain which were universal in all cultures examined. These included time, intensity, location, quality, cause and curability. More culture-specific dimensions included the Chinese concept suantong, a multidimensional concept of bone, muscle, joint, tooth and gingival pain. 'Real' and 'imagined' pains were contrasts described by Western subjects, especially dentists; 'imagined pain' being the conversion of fear or anxiety into perceived pain. These data indicate that the data gathering and data analytic methods were reliable and sensitive to cultural variables and that ethnicity played a stronger role in determining perceptions of pain description than professional socialization for this population sample of Chinese and Western subjects.