Understanding recall of weekly pain from a momentary assessment perspective: absolute agreement, between- and within-person consistency, and judged change in weekly pain

Abstract

To better understand the association between pain recalled over a previous week and the average of multiple momentary reports of pain taken during the same period, 68 patients with chronic pain completed both weekly recall and momentary reports over a 2-week period and assessed their change in pain over the 2 weeks. Pearson correlations and intraclass correlation coefficients were computed to index three different ways of comparing the measures on both a between-person and within-person basis. Between-person correspondence between weekly and momentary reports was generally moderate to high, but within-person correspondence was low. Judged change was only weakly related to changes over a week computed from weekly recall or from average momentary reports. Given the importance of within-person change for treatment studies, these results indicate a serious nonequivalence in weekly recall and averaged momentary reports of pain.