Iowa satisfaction with anesthesia scale

I was gratified to learn that Dr. Kim and colleagues found the Iowa Satisfaction with Anesthesia Scale [1] useful for comparing patient satisfaction between dexmedetomidine and propofol/alfentanil groups during cataract surgery [2]. Fung and colleagues found reliability and validity for cataract surgery patients among English speaking patients [3]. A recent multicenter center showed reliability and validity when used by telephone with English­speaking patients [4]. In English, there is a clear distinction between the somatic “I felt pain” and emotive “I hurt.” Is this true in Korean? If respondents could not understand the meaning of “I hurt,” then the internal consistency of the 11 items would be lower than the Cronbach alpha of 0.84 (95% confidence interval, 0.79-0.87) from the multicenter study [4]. If “I hurt” and “I felt pain” were not distinguishable, responses would be the same for nearly all patients, unlike the 39% giving different scores from the multicenter study [4].