Impact of Urinary Incontinence on Quality of Life
Several limitations warrant attention. Due to the difficulty in recruiting a larger sample, we were challenged to detect statistically significant differences in 12 dyadic responses. We initially attempted to recruit eligible participants from one hospital's rehabilitation program and continence care program located in a large Canadian city. Due to poor recruitment, we needed to expand our recruitment protocol to include two home care programs and affected individuals from the community who responded to newspaper advertisements. With five pairs of affected individuals and support persons who were recruited from the community, we were not able to validate self-reports on their UI condition, medical stability, and cognitive and communication/vision/hearing capabilities with clinic staff or medical records which pose a limitation to this study.
This study was composed of a convenience sample of affected individuals who reported that they were diagnosed with varied medical diagnoses and had limited or no observed cognitive deficits. It is difficult to extrapolate findings to different settings, specific medical diagnoses or treatments related to UI, and affected individuals who have serious cognitive deficits. As well, our study's sample was composed mainly of female participants that precluded our testing of the differential impact of gender and different roles or relationships (e.g., non-relatives) on support person's inferences of I-QOL. Previous studies on re sponse comparability indicated that relatives tend to provide more accurate inferences in comparison to friends (Magaziner, Bassett, Hebel, & Gruber-Baldini, 1996), which makes generalizability of our study findings to nonrelatives challenging. Furth er, this study was composed of participants who might have been more willing to discuss the impact of bladder control issues with the research nurse, affected individuals with a QOL that was moderately impacted by UI, and a majority of participants who indicated that they talked openly about UI issues in the home (albeit the support person's rating was higher than the patient's rating).
Study Limitations
Several limitations warrant attention. Due to the difficulty in recruiting a larger sample, we were challenged to detect statistically significant differences in 12 dyadic responses. We initially attempted to recruit eligible participants from one hospital's rehabilitation program and continence care program located in a large Canadian city. Due to poor recruitment, we needed to expand our recruitment protocol to include two home care programs and affected individuals from the community who responded to newspaper advertisements. With five pairs of affected individuals and support persons who were recruited from the community, we were not able to validate self-reports on their UI condition, medical stability, and cognitive and communication/vision/hearing capabilities with clinic staff or medical records which pose a limitation to this study.
This study was composed of a convenience sample of affected individuals who reported that they were diagnosed with varied medical diagnoses and had limited or no observed cognitive deficits. It is difficult to extrapolate findings to different settings, specific medical diagnoses or treatments related to UI, and affected individuals who have serious cognitive deficits. As well, our study's sample was composed mainly of female participants that precluded our testing of the differential impact of gender and different roles or relationships (e.g., non-relatives) on support person's inferences of I-QOL. Previous studies on re sponse comparability indicated that relatives tend to provide more accurate inferences in comparison to friends (Magaziner, Bassett, Hebel, & Gruber-Baldini, 1996), which makes generalizability of our study findings to nonrelatives challenging. Furth er, this study was composed of participants who might have been more willing to discuss the impact of bladder control issues with the research nurse, affected individuals with a QOL that was moderately impacted by UI, and a majority of participants who indicated that they talked openly about UI issues in the home (albeit the support person's rating was higher than the patient's rating).
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