Twenty-six children with juvenile chronic arthritis and their parents participated in the study. We compared the assessments of pain perceived by the children on a visual analogue scale (VAS) with assessments on a 4-point verbal descriptor scale (VDS-4). In children aged 10 y and older, the pain assessment results of the children and the parents were compared. The discordance in paired data from the scale comparisons and from the inter-rater comparisons was evaluated using a statistical method developed for ordinal data. The preference of scale and motivation of the older children were summarized.
The parents and children used the VAS and the VDS-4 differently. The children showed a higher inter-scale discordance compared with the parents and they gave their pain a higher rating on the VAS but a lower rating on the VDS-4 than their parents. The VAS was preferred by the children but did not show the most reliable results.