TABLE 2.

Factor structure and internal consistency of the questionnaire

Questionnaire items*	Component 1	Component 2	Component 3	Component 4
1 Older people experience pain less intensely than younger people	0.52
2 Pain medication works better in young people than in the elderly	0.65			0.41
3 Pain medication works longer in the elderly than in young people	0.75
4 Pain medication has more side effects in the elderly than in younger people	0.58			0.36
5 Dementia patients experience less pain than nondementia patients	0.55
6 Assessing pain in a dementia patient is a matter of guessing	0.69
7 Where I work, pain is assessed correctly		0.86
8 Where I work, pain is treated correctly		0.84
9 Where I work, much attention is given to pain in dementia patients		0.81
10 Pain medication should only be administered to patients suffering from severe pain			0.67
11 Patients are often prescribed too much pain medication			0.69
12 It is better to administer pain medication ‘when necessary’, rather than according to a fixed schedule			0.74
13 Administering pain medication should be postponed as long as possible, because dementia patients should receive as little pain medication as possible	0.31		0.50
14 A dementia patient should first report pain before receiving the next dose of pain medication			0.57
15 Pain is part of the aging process				0.71
16 Older people are more likely to be affected by pain than younger people				0.62
17 Pain medication, if administered in large quantities, easily leads to addiction among the elderly	0.30			0.64
Data analysis
Cronbach’s alpha (total scale, 17 items 0.782)	0.74	0.80	0.68	0.58
Eigenvalue	4.06	2.11	1.72	1.35
Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy.	0.73
Bartlett’s test of sphericity significance	0.00

^*Factor loadings >0.30 are presented. Extraction method: principal component analysis; Rotation method: oblimin