Interactive Sections Of An Internet-Based Intervention Increase Patient Empowerment: A Study With Chronic Back Pain Patients

Empowerment is a pychological outcome measure. Patient empowerment is defined as a complex construct that includes different individual competencies and skills. Empowerment can be considered a multilevel and multidimensional construct closely linked to self-determination and self-efficacy.

Empowerment is measured the with the Psychological Empowerment Scale According to the scale, empowerment is a multidimensional concept composed of four cognitive dimensions (or task assessments): impact (or the degree to which behavior is seen as "making a difference"), competence (or the degree to which a person can perform task activities skillfully), meaningfulness (or the individual's intrinsic caring about a given task), and choice (or whether a person's behavior is perceived as self-determined).

Medication misuse is measured with the Prescription Medication Use and Perception of Risk Instrument. The scale is scored as a continuous measure to provide greater sensitivity ranging from 0 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree) with higher scores indicating greater level of medication misuse.

Physical exercise in leisure time is measured with the respective sub-dimensions from the Short Questionnaire to Assess Health-Enhancing Physical Activity and it gives the amount of time spent in physical exercise in hours/week

Pain burden is measured with six items from the Chronic Pain Grading Scale that gives two measures related with pain: pain disability perception and pain intensity perception