Background and Objectives: Women with interstitial cystitis (IC) suffer from spontaneous serious bladder pain symptoms without immediate resolution. Women with IC may lack knowledge of how to help themselves. Therefore, a measurement of IC self-help and medical-resource-seeking for women with IC is needed. Materials and Methods: This study recruited 100 women with IC from a teaching hospital in Northern Taiwan. The reliability and validity of the Interstitial Cystitis Self-Help and Medical Resources Scale (ICSR) were assessed using expert validity, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to test the construct validity, composite reliability to evaluate the internal consistency, and item analysis to test the discrimination validity of each item. Results: The results showed that the ICSR had accurate goodness-of-fit indices and the component reliability ranged from 0.42 to 0.83, indicating good reliability and validity. Conclusions: The ICSR is recommended for screening the self-help and medical-resource-seeking abilities of women with IC to aid in diagnosing IC and providing more precise medical treatments.
Keywords: interstitial cystitis; medical resources; reliability; self-help; validity.