How do children describe pain? A tentative assessment.

In a study to determine how children describe the experience of pain, we queried a convenience sample of 100 children in hospitals and 114 children in church and private schools who were between 9 and 12 years old. The questions were designed to seek correlations by age among boys and girls, and between hospitalized and non-hospitalized children that would aid health professionals in strategies that will identify and assist the child who is in pain. The preliminary results show that children clearly describe pain, that there are no appreciable differences by age groups, but that children who are hospitalized describe pain differently from children who are not.