We conducted secondary analysis of existing data from a National Institutes of Health [20]
sponsored study of effects of a nurse coaching protocol on cancer pain. All data in this study
were collected at the pre-treatment baseline evaluation. The study received approval from
the Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) at the University of Washington, all referral
institutions, and the University of Illinois at Chicago and adhered to all human subject
regulations. The primary study was a randomized controlled study of patients recruited from
11 clinical oncology sites. Participants gave written consent for their data to be used for
educational purposes and for future research. For the primary study, the eligible patients
were adults 18 years or older who spoke English, had a diagnosis of lung cancer, and
experienced at least one pain episode within the week prior to data collection. Patients who
scored 20 or less on a Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) [21] were excluded. The
final total sample for our study was 107 lung cancer patients who had completed the study
instruments. The demographic characteristics of our sample appear in Table 1.