Children's pain vocabulary

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Abstract
This paper will address children's pain vocabulary, that is, the self-reported words provided by the children, in a descriptive study carried out to examine how a group of school-age children view their pain. This was an initial step to demonstrate that children can describe pain and do possess a pain vocabulary. Our aim was to determine the feasibility of achieving a meaningful grouping of children's pain words and the pain intensity implied by the words. A sample of 40 school-age children were the subjects for this study. All the pain word descriptors used by the children in response to the question 'Can you think of words to describe what pain feels like?' were categorized on the basis of the Melzack classification.