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Abstract

Background: Recent work has explored the sociocultural aspects of pain. However, global evidence is scarce, and little is known about how levels of pain differ across cultures and across demographic groups within those different cultures.

Methods: Using a nationally representative dataset of 202,898 individuals from 22 countries and a random effects meta-analysis, we examine the proportion of people in pain across key demographic groups (age, gender, marital status, employment status, education, immigration status, religious service attendance, race/ethnicity) and across countries.

Results: We find substantial variation in pain across countries and demographic groups. Unadjusted proportions tests show that Egypt (0.60), Brazil (0.59), Australia (0.56), and Turkey (0.53) have the greatest proportion of people in pain whereas Israel (0.25), South Africa (0.29), Poland (0.32), and Japan (0.33) have the lowest proportion. The random effects meta-analysis shows that, across countries, the proportion of people in pain is highest in older age groups, among women and other gender groups, the widowed, those who were retired, those who had low level of education, and those who attended a religious service more than once a week. The analysis shows no difference in the proportion of people in pain regarding immigration status.

Conclusions: Pain varies substantially across countries and key demographic groups. This work provides valuable foundational insights for future research on the sociocultural factors
of pain.

Plain Language Summary
Understanding how the proportion of people in pain varies across key demographic groups and across countries is a crucial foundation for the relatively new literature on the social factors of pain. Here, we used rigorous statistical techniques to uncover how pain varies across demographic groups and across 22 countries from all over the world. We found that the proportion of people in pain is highest in older age groups, among women and other gender groups, the widowed, those who were retired, those who had low level of education, and those who attended a religious service more than once a week. Substantial country-specific
variation was also found.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Publisher Keywords:	Bodily pain, demographics, country differences, world, cultural variation
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine
Departments:	School of Health & Medical Sciences School of Health & Medical Sciences > Psychology
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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