[Development of a questionnaire to measure the effect of urinary incontinence on female sexuality: a reliability and validity study].

Objectives: This study developed a measure of the degree of the effect of urinary incontinence on female sexuality and tested the reliability and validity of the developed measure. Effect of Urinary Incontinence on Sexuality Questionnaire (EISQ).

Methods: The EISQ was developed from a thorough literature review and interviews of 20 individuals with urinary incontinence who said their incontinence had affected their dyadic relationship. These items were submitted to an analysis of content validity. This work resulted in a 28 items questionnaire that used a 4-point Likert-type response scale. The reliability and validity of the EISQ was tested with 144 women with incontinence who visited out-patient clinic in six hospitals.

Results: Cronbach's alpha as the index of internal consistency was high. The EISQ total was 0.90 and alpha ranged from 0.70 to 0.93 for the six subscales. Six factors each with an eigenvalue greater-than-or-equal-to-one were extracted from a principal components factors analysis with varimax rotation. The cumulative percentage of variance explained by this solution was 69.0%. Concurrent validity analyses confirmed our predictions that the EISQ scores were related to Patient Incontinence Stress (ISQ-P) scores.

Conclusion: The EISQ proved to be reliable and valid as a self-administered measure for assessing the effect of urinary incontinence on female sexuality. The EISQ has demonstrated sufficient psychometric properties to warrant continued study of other samples and to explore the relationship between EISQ and other outcome variables.