- Conclusion
Children with intellectual disabilities can express and assess severity of pain, whether it is using EVA or Faces Pain Scale Revised, and whether it is in relation to a painful situation experienced by a fictional character or to evoke a reported pain. However, it should be noted the scores are less extreme when they affect to the assessment of reported pain, and therefore they use the assessment tools more appropriately.
Children with low intellectual disabilities, especially those with aetiology linked to prematurity, score higher when referring to a painful situation such as vaccination. According to Grunau, Whitfield and Petrie (1998), this is because these children are often forced to receive important medical care such as vaccination since birth. There is, therefore, an overestimation of pain intensity is related to increase of the sensitivity due to their personal experience from birth. On the other hand, we can note a lower assessment of other types of situations (i.e., burn, fall) which may be due to the child’s poor familiarity with the event in question.
Authors also found that all participants have a rich and consistent vocabulary to describe the intensity of pain. They have similar abilities to those observed in the study of Ross and Ross (1984) in children aged from 5 to 12 years without intellectual disabilities. However, according to Abu-Saad (1984), this is only because participants use a vocabulary like children with a mental age close to that of Ross and Ross’s study.
Nevertheless, this study has a limit. Indeed, the order of test’s passation was not counterbalanced, that is, all participants first estimated the intensity of fictional character’s pain before assessing the reported pain. However, among participants with intellectual disabilities, it is necessary to contextualize the experience to obtain more reliable answers when evoking reported pain.
In terms of perspectives, authors plan to study the dynamics of the dialogue between the experimenter and the child to know the psychological characteristics involved in the expression of pain.
