Validity and Therapeutic Efficacy of Individual Patient Goal Attainment Procedures in a Chronic Pain Treatment Center

Abstract

A sample of 180 patients treated at The Boulder Pain Control Center was randomly chosen to participate in Goal Attainment Scaling (GAS). Of these participants, a total of 76 returned for a 6-month follow-up assessment. Data from these patients were used for two studies: (a) a study of the construct validity of the GAS as a treatment outcome measure, and (b) an assessment of treatment efficacy using the GAS. For the first study, Rao's canonical factor analysis was used to judge the construct validity of the GAS scores. There is moderate statistical evidence to show that GAS can add to our understanding of the structure of pain treatment outcome measures. For the second study, a simple comparison of the treatment group (n = 76) with a control group (n = 129) on several functional, verbal, and sociocultural outcome measures showed that GAS participation accounted for 24.7% of the variance in improvement after treatment.