Understanding Pain Study
Research type
Research Study
Full title
The Understanding Pain Study. Individuals’ cognitive, emotional and behavioural responses to back pain: a qualitative investigation.
IRAS ID
218693
Contact name
LaKrista Morton
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Aberdeen
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
Back pain is a common problem that most people will experience in their lifetime. For the great majority of people, this pain is not caused by a specific condition or serious illness. Medical care is therefore unlikely to be helpful. The general advice is to continue being physically active and to use over-the-counter painkillers. Nevertheless, many people with back pain seek medical care. Previous information campaigns to inform the public have attempted to change individuals’ knowledge about back pain and how it should be managed. The aim was to reduce the demand for medical care as well as missed work due to back pain. However, most of these campaigns were not ultimately successful. One reason for this could be that they did not necessarily change beliefs about back pain which are related to seeking medical care or missing work. We are interested in developing a future campaign to reduce demand for medical care; prior to developing this, we need to understand how individuals, who do and do not consult their GP, think about their back pain and respond to it. To do this, we will carry out an interview study within Grampian to understand how individuals think about and respond to their back pain.
REC name
East Midlands - Derby Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
17/EM/0049
Date of REC Opinion
8 Feb 2017
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion