BACKGROUND: About 1 in 5 adolescents undergoing major surgery develops chronic postsurgical pain. Various risk and resilience factors for recovery and chronic postsurgical pain have been identified, including parental characteristics. However, research commonly relies on nomothetic data, whereas psychometric properties of diaries assessing pediatric postsurgical recovery in everyday life are understudied. This study aimed to evaluate preliminary reliability, validity, and variability of diary data in adolescents and their parents after spinal fusion surgery. METHODS: Adolescents with idiopathic scoliosis undergoing spinal fusion surgery and their parents were asked to complete daily diaries for 7 consecutive days at 5 time points: before surgery and 3 weeks, 6 weeks, 6 months, and 12 months after surgery. Diaries were developed based on validated questionnaires measuring relevant constructs of pediatric postsurgical recovery. Internal consistency
test-retest reliability
convergent, divergent, and concurrent criterion validity
and variability were examined. RESULTS: The sample comprised 95 adolescents and 95 parents. Overall compliance rate was approximately 80% in both adolescents and parents, with a total of 5282 diary entries analyzed. Internal consistency for multi-item variables ranged from good to excellent (α = 0.82-0.93) for adolescent data and acceptable to excellent (α = 0.74-0.93) for parent data. All test-retest correlations were significant-large (ρ = 0.60-0.76) for adolescent data and medium to large for parent data (ρ = 0.57-0.80). Regarding validity, all but 3 correlations between diary variables were significant. Diary variables generally correlated significantly with corresponding questionnaire data. Variability was low in some variables. CONCLUSIONS: These results provide evidence for psychometric properties regarding reliability, validity, and variability of diaries monitoring processes of postsurgical recovery in everyday life in adolescents undergoing spinal fusion surgery. Replication is suggested for refinement and further validation, with particular attention to variability and evaluation of sensitivity to change.