Qualitative methods in pain assessment : report of research project

The paper is a report of research project concerning qualitative methods in pain assessment. The linguistic analysis of patients with chronic pain narratives was done on the first stage. It was showed that pain is communicated in an individualized way - people use different grammatical categories and stylistic means talking about their pain experience. On the second stage of the project the adequacy of McGill Pain Questionnaire in pain assessment and diagnosis was investigated. Conclusions are connected with human experience, broadly speaking, and scientific method used in psychology.