Advances in Applied Sociology, 2022, 12, 634-643 https://www.scirp.org/journal/aasoci ISSN Online: 2165-4336 ISSN Print: 2165-4328 DOI: 10.4236/aasoci.2022.1210044 Oct. 25, 2022 634 Advances in Applied Sociology The Legitimacy of Pain as an Object of Study Lourdes Biedma-Velázquez 1 , María Isabel García-Rodríguez 1 , Juan Manuel García-González 2 , José Antonio Cerrillo-Vidal 3 , Gema Serrano-Gemes 1,4 , Antonio Blanco-Hungría 4,5 , Rafael Serrano-del-Rosal 1 1 Institute for Advanced Social Studies (IESA), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Córdoba, Spain 2 Pablo de Olavide University, Seville, Spain 3 University of Córdoba, Córdoba, Spain 4 Maimonides Institute for Biomedical Research of Córdoba, University of Córdoba, Córdoba, Spain 5 Córdoba-Guadalquivir Healthcare District, Andalusian Healthcare Service, Córdoba, Spain Abstract Pain, as a multidimensional phenomenon, must be tackled from different perspectives. The sociological perspective is one of the less frequent ap- proaches in the bibliography. The main results of a pioneering study about the social legitimacy of pain are set forth in this paper, analyzing citizens’ pain today, the feelings it causes in them, the type of pain they suffer, and how this type of pain has an influence on the perception of their own pain and that of others. A quantitative design was adopted, through a cross-sectional survey of general population living in Spain (n = 1600) conducted online in 2021. The results point out that a high percentage of citizens were in pain when they took the survey, even if they stated that they were in good health. In general, feeling pain means having a worse quality of life. Having pain of a psychological origin involves higher levels of shame or guilt, as well as the feeling of being judged by others, than the other types of pain. The pain caused by cancer is the one with the highest social support, followed by the grief caused by the death of a loved one, while the pain with the lowest sup- port is the one caused by alcoholism or obesity. Feeling that one’s pain is un- derstood and legitimized by others is fundamental to being able to face it, that is why it is important to carry out studies analyzing pain from this perspec- tive. Keywords Pain, Legitimacy, Sociology, Measurement 1. Introduction Pain as an object of study, as well as its interpretation, must always be framed How to cite this paper: Biedma-Velázquez, L., García-Rodríguez, M. I., García-González, J. M., Cerrillo-Vidal, J. A., Serrano-Gemes, G., Blanco-Hungría, A., & Serrano-del-Rosal, R. (2022). The Legitimacy of Pain as an Object of Study. Advances in Applied Soci- ology, 12, 634-643. https://doi.org/10.4236/aasoci.2022.1210044 Received: September 5, 2022 Accepted: October 22, 2022 Published: October 25, 2022 Copyright © 2022 by author(s) and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY 4.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Open Access