BACKGROUND: Chronic pain affects millions of Americans every day. Research shows that using different coping strategies (e.g. catastrophizing, coping self-statement and prayer) has differential impacts on pain outcomes. One of these coping mechanisms, prayer, has been examined less frequently than others perhaps because there is currently only one measure of prayer as a coping mechanism for pain, the Prayer/ Hope subscale of the Coping Strategies Questionnaire-Revised (CSQ-R). The latter, however, is an incomplete representation of prayer practices and hence the CSQ-R only offers a narrow measure of prayer. Recent research has characterized the CSQ-R as measuring prayer in a passive nature, which may be associated with poor pain outcomes. This measure does not include an active style of prayer. Furthermore, the evolution of research characterizing the petitionary content of prayer has resulted in substantive data revealing the contrasting dimensions of the prayer content with opposite reported outcomes. Thus, there is the need for a more comprehensive measure of prayer related to pain which clearly delineates the petitionary content of prayer. The current gap in the literature highlighted the beneficial nature of certain types of prayer for pain management and also the importance of the target to which the prayer is directed but noted that there exist no validated measures of pain-related prayer types. The aim of this study is to develop and validate a new measure of the use of prayer amongst people who experience pain, the Pain related PRAYERS (PPRAYERS) questionnaire. METHODS: An interim data analysis was performed of 42 adult participants with chronic pain who use prayer as a means to cope with their pain who completed a battery of questionnaires including the Brief Pain Inventory, PPRAYERS, Duke University Religion Index (DUREL), Coping Strategies Questionnaire-Revised (CSQ-R) and Pain Catastrophizing Scale (PCS).The population analyzed represented a fraction of an estimated target sample of 100 participants for this phase of the research. In order to assess the factor structure of PPRAYERS, two principal component analysis factor analyses were conducted on the Pain Related Prayer Questionnaire (PPRAYERS). In addition, bivariate correlations between the identified factors of PPRAYERS and other known pain-related psychosocial measures were examined to assess convergent and discriminant validity of the questionnaire. RESULTS: An interim, exploratory principal component analysis yielded six factors, active prayer, passive prayer, neutral prayer, along with three other factors that were atheoretical and accounted for 77% variance. However, based on our a priori theory (i.e. three types of prayer: active, passive and neutral) as well as minimal variance accounted for by the other three atheoretical factors, a follow up analysis of a three-factor model was performed and accounted for 58% variance. There was good convergent validity between the DUREL and the active prayer subscale of the PPRAYERS questionnaire. There was also good discriminant validity between the PCS and all subscales on the PPRAYERS questionnaire. CONCLUSION: According to these preliminary data, the PPRAYERS measure is comprised of three distinct factors: active, passive, and neutral prayer and is associated with pain and other pain-related factors. This study and the creation of PPRAYERS lays the foundation for additional studies evaluating the benefit of active, passive and neutral prayer in the treatment of chronic pain especially in patients open to religious, spiritual or meditative-based coping strategies. / 2023-12-02T00:00:00Z