The pain attitudes and beliefs scale for physiotherapists: psychometric properties of the Croatian version

AbstractObjective This study aims to create a Croatian version of the PABS-PT questionnaire and determine the psychometric properties.Design This study is a cross-sectional survey of Croatian physiotherapists.Methods The Pain Attitudes and Beliefs Scale for Physiotherapists is a questionnaire that includes 36 items. Only physiotherapists working with patients suffering from low back pain and who have been working for at least 1 year in the field of musculoskeletal physiotherapy participated in the study. The Factor and Cronbach’s alpha analyses were performed to determine the factor structure and internal consistency.Results A total of 203 physiotherapists (response rate 69.52%) completed the PABS-PT-CRO. The analysis reveals two factors, i.e. a biomedical and biopsychosocial treatment orientation. The two-factor structure explained 25.8% of the total variance, with factor 1 contributing 17.8% and factor 2 contributing 8%. Thirty-six items were reduced to fifteen, with ten items loading on factor 1 and five on factor 2. Cronbach’s alpha was 0.762 for factor 1 (biomedical scale) and 0.666 for factor 2 (biopsychosocial scale).Conclusion The Croatian version of the PABS-PT appears to be equivalent to the original Dutch version and indicates a similar internal consistency. The questionnaire is valuable and necessary in clinical work for physiotherapists.Keywords: Biopsychosocialattitudephysiotherapistlow back painpsychometric properties Author contributionsBoth authors contributed to the conception and design of the study, data analysis, writing, and revising the manuscript. MB was responsible for data collection.Ethical approvalThis study was approved by the Ethics Committee at the Clinical Hospital Sveti Duh.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThe author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.