Revised Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ-R)

The revised Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ-R)³⁰ is a self-report questionnaire to measure the components of illness representations according to Leventhal’s CSM^3,31. With 78 items, the German version of the IPQ-R aims to assess the individual’s beliefs and feelings about her or his illness on a five-point Likert scale³² with the domains: (1) identity a (patient’s experience of a symptom while being ill) and identity b (patient’s beliefs that a symptom is caused through the illness); (2) timeline; (3) cyclical timeline; (4) consequences; (5) personal control; (6) treatment control; (7) coherence; and (8) emotional representation^30,33. The items are phrased as such: “My illness greatly affects my life” (domain: consequences), “I believe my illness will persist for a long duration” (domain: timeline), and “Thinking about my illness makes me feel depressed” (domain: emotional representation). High scores on the domains of identity, consequences and timeline represent strongly held beliefs about the number of symptoms; they also represent the occurrence of negative consequences and a high chronicity and cyclical nature of the illness. High scores on the domains of personal and treatment control and coherence represent positive beliefs about control and one’s personal understanding of the illness³¹. In the German version of the IPQ-R, we replaced the word “illness” with “chronic pain” to address, in particular, participants’ chronic pain conditions, as recommended by Moss-Morris³⁰. Cronbach’s alpha for the study sample was good (α = 0.80).