Psychometric properties of the German-language questionnaire for urinary incontinence diagnosis (QUID) in women with urinary incontinence

Abstract

Purpose The aim of this study was to translate the questionnaire for urinary incontinence diagnosis (QUID) into German and to assess its psychometric properties in German-speaking women with urinary incontinence (UI). The QUID contains two subscales to measure symptom severity of stress urinary incontinence (SUI) and urge urinary incontinence (UUI) and to distinguish between both forms.

Methods A total of 161 women with UI completed the QUID and the King’s Health Questionnaire (KHQ), each in the German version. To examine construct validity Spearman’s correlation coefficients between both questionnaires were computed. Furthermore, the internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) of the QUID and its criterion validity were examined. Looking at criterion validity, sensitivity, specificity, ROC curves, and Youden-indexes were computed for both subscales.

Results The QUID showed good construct validity by strong correlations with related domains of the KHQ. Cronbach’s alpha values were good for both subscales of the QUID (SUI-subscale: 0.76; UUI-subscale: 0.86). Sensitivity and specificity were 83% (95% CI, 0.72–0.9) and 45% (95% CI, 0.25–0.67) for the SUI-subscale and 83% (95% CI, 0.7–0.91) and 56% (95% CI, 0.4–0.72) for the UUI-subscale. Youden-index was 0.28 for the SUI-subscale and 0.39 for the UUI-subscale at the given cut-off values.

Conclusion Psychometric properties of the German-language QUID are principally good and support its use in the German-speaking area. However, the modest specificity when distinguishing between SUI and UUI should be taken into account.