Incontinence Quality of Life Instrument
The Incontinence Quality of Life Instrument (I-QOL) is a self report quality of life measure specific to urinary incontinence.
Women with urinary incontinence.
Method of Use
The I-QOL has 22 questions with the following 3 subscales: avoid and limiting behaviors (items), psychosocial impacts (9 items), and social embarassment (5 items). It is easily self-administered and takes about 5 minutes to complete.
The I-QOL had high internal consistency (alpha = 0.95) for the overall summary score. The subscales were also internally consistent at alpha 0.87 for behaviors, 0.93 for psychosocial impacts, and 0.91 for social embarassment. The intraclass coefficient assessment of reproducibility at 2 weeks was 0.91 for the total score and 0.87, 0.91, and 0.88 for the behaviors, psychosocial impacts, and social embarassment subscales, respectively.
Construct validity was examined by comparing the I-QOL and its subscales to related measures. All correlations were signficant at the 0.01 level except "bodily pain." I-QOL scores were found to be more closely related to well-being (0.42) than to either mental health (0.35) or bodily pain (0.15).
Statistics summarizing responsiveness varied from 0.4 to 0.8 and were associated with a 2% to 13% change in the I-QOL. Minimally important changes were defined as the percent change in I-QOL score for the improved group using the measures of pad weight and number of incontinent episodes and lowest category of improvement for patient global impression ratings.
The I-QOL is available in 16 different languages.
- Patrick DL, Martin ML, Bushnell DM, Yalcin I, Wagner TH, Bueshing DP. Quality of life of women with urinary incontinence. Urology 1999;53:71-6.