Title: The Individual in Focus: An Idiographic Roadmap for Chronic Pain Treatment
Abstract: Traditional group-based approaches in chronic pain research often yield treatments with modest effects, as group averages can mask the profound heterogeneity of individual experiences, a reality particularly evident in complex conditions like endometriosis. This Superlab aims to contribute to the field’s idiographic turn by outlining a practical roadmap for a more personalized science, grounded in empirical findings that the assumption of ergodicity is often untenable in chronic pain data.
The outlined framework integrates several key concepts gaining traction in the field. It explores using the Single-Case Experimental Design (SCED) baseline as an intensive assessment phase to build richer, functional conceptualizations for each person. A central component of this framework is a proposed shift in our measurement philosophy: moving beyond a focus on universal "validation" toward a more nuanced assessment of a measure’s "adequacy" and "utility" for a specific individual.
The session will review relevant non-ergodicity findings and demonstrate the potential for easy and accessible methods, like cross-lagged correlations, for informing treatment tailoring. data from the EndoACT study will be presented to illustrate how these principles can be applied in practice and contribute to the ongoing development of more precise and personalized process-based therapies in chronic pain.
Register here - https://contextualscience.org/superlab_registration