Pain-Related Fear in Adults Living With Chronic Pain: Development and Psychometric Validation of a Brief Form of the Tampa Scale of Kinesiophobia

Objective: To develop and validate a brief version of the Tampa Scale of Kinesiophobia (TSK) while preserving content validity in a mixed chronic pain population.

Design: Cross-sectional study.

Setting: Tertiary care interdisciplinary chronic pain clinic.

Participants: Adults with chronic pain (N=933; mean age, 53.5±15.7 years; 63% women).

Intervention: Not applicable.

Main outcome measure: TSK-11 measured at intake. Self-reported data from a patient registry were extracted from November 2017 to October 2019.

Results: An exploratory factor analysis identified a 2-factor structure from the TSK-11 and item reduction resulted in a 7-item TSK (TSK-7) with 61.2% explained variance and Cronbach's alphas of 0.76 and 0.70 for each of the 2 factors. To maximally reduce the number of items without affecting internal consistency, a 5-item TSK (TSK-5) with 72% explained variance was also explored. Strong correlations were found between the newly developed brief TSK versions and TSK-11 (r>0.93), suggesting good concurrent validity. TSK-11, TSK-7, and TSK-5 had similar convergent validity with moderate correlations for pain catastrophizing (r=0.57, 0.58, 0.54), depression (r=0.45, 0.46, 0.42), pain interference (r=0.43, 0.44, 0.40), and pain acceptance (r=-0.57, -0.59, -0.55).

Conclusions: These 2 brief versions of the TSK may help to simplify questionnaires across chronic pain centers where multiple outcome measures are used for a complete biopsychosocial assessment of patients.