The development of an Incontinence Treatment Motivation Questionnaire for patients undergoing pelvic floor physiotherapy in the treatment of stress incontinence.

Introduction and hypothesis: The aim of this paper is to develop a motivation questionnaire regarding perseverance in pelvic floor muscle training (PFMT) supervised by physiotherapists for stress urinary incontinence.

Methods: Sixteen semi-structured interviews were conducted in women with stress urinary incontinence that revealed 15 common themes; 117 items were constructed and reviewed by continence advisors. Surviving items (n = 73) were administered to 210 women. Data were analysed for item properties, factor analysis was used to examine the questionnaire structure and tests of convergence/divergence used to check for sensitivity.

Results: The Incontinence Treatment Motivation Questionnaire (ITMQ) comprises 18-items in five scales, assessing attitudes towards treatment (72.62% of explained variance; alpha = 0.87), reasons for not doing PFMT (55.73%; alpha = 0.74), living with incontinence (62.70% variance; alpha = 0.70), desire for treatment (65.37% variance; alpha = 0.74) and the effect of incontinence severity on PFMT (51.62% variance, alpha = 0.68). Scales were generally sensitive to known group differences.

Conclusions: This study represents the first effort to develop a motivation scale for PFMT. This validated Motivation Questionnaire is an instrument to test the impact of motivation upon cure, in PFMT.