Multidimensional Affect and Pain Survey

In the MAPS questionnaire the descriptors are placed in sentences to clarify their meaning. The patient rates these statements on a response scale from not at all (0) to very much so (5).

Supercluster I, somatosensory pain qualities

17 subclusters

57 descriptors of painful sensory qualities

Supercluster II, emotional pain

Eight subclusters

26 descriptors of negative emotional qualities

Supercluster III, well-being

Fve subclusters

18 descriptors of positive affect and health

 

History:

The 101 items of MAPS were selected from earlier sets of 270 (Clark et al., 1995) and 189 (Yang et al., 2000) descriptors of pain and emotion. The similarities of the 189 descriptors were evaluated by 104 female and male college students of Puerto Rican, European–American and African–American descent. Each volunteer first sorted descriptors that she/he considered to be similar into piles. Following this pile-

sort procedure the volunteers merged their individual piles two at a time on the basis of similarity. This sequentialmerge procedure continued until only two piles remained.

The data were evaluated by an agglomerative, hierarchical clustering technique,    the Average-Linkage-Between-Groups algorithm (Sokal and Michener, 1958) to yield hierarchically organized clusters of descriptors that were similar in meaning, a dendrogram. Details of the development and validation of MAPS are presented elsewhere (Yang et al.,2000).The final set of 101 words used in MAPS included those

words  that  remained  after  eliminating  88  (of  the  189) descriptors that failed to have a common meaning among the  six  sex-ethnocultural  groups.  This  left  a  composite dendrogram of 101 words that was relatively free of gender and  ethnocultural  bias.  The structure  of  the  dendrogram

determined which descriptors fell within each cluster for MAPS as well as the location of the 30 subclusters within the three MAPS superclusters.