Incontinence Quality of Life Instrument

Original Editor - Your name will be added here if you created the original content for this page.

Lead Editors - Your name will be added here if you are a lead editor on this page.  Read more.

Objective

The Incontinence Quality of Life Instrument (I-QOL) is a self report quality of life measure specific to urinary incontinence.

Intended Population

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. 

Evidence

Reliability

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.

Validity

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).

Responsiveness

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.

Miscellaneous

The I-QOL is available in 16 different languages.

References

References will automatically be added here, see adding references tutorial.