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| Level of Resilience Among Infertile Couples: A Quantitative Study | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Paper Id :
16103 Submission Date :
28/05/2022 Acceptance Date :
14/06/2022 Publication Date :
16/06/2022
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| Abstract | Infertility and the use of assisted reproductive therapies affect infertile couple’s life. Infertile couple face many physical, psychological, and financial challenges, having a higher level of resilience will help the infertile couple to adapt to infertility conditions and achieve their therapeutic goals. This study was aimed to determine the level of resilience among infertile couples. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This study was conducted on 50 infertile couples. Samples were selected by convenience sampling method. Information was gathered using resilience scale. Data were analysed using descriptive statistical methods (t-test, ANOVA). P < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. RESULT: Mean scores and F value showed that there is a significant difference among husband and wives score and the level of resilience is low among infertile couples CONCLUSIONS: Infertile couples showed low level of resilience and there is a difference between husband and wives resilience. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Keywords | Infertility, Resilience. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Introduction |
Resilience is a very perplexing and multidimensional term, its results affects life of survivors when it interactes with their neurobiological, social, and personal factors then it clearly shows the ability to accomodately cope with stress and adversity to maintain a life which was experienced before the truma. The word resilience coined from the Latin verb resilire, meaning "to jump back in the former state" or "to recoil it". It is a capability of a fully stressed individual to recuperate itself after profound stress. For infertile couples, resilience can be considered as an unspecific defensive layer against infertility-specific distress and the result is boosted life style. When offering counselling to involuntarily childless couples,then there is a need to spread awareness amongst them, that should be raised for resilience as a couple's resource and a “generic” factor of coping style. In the same way, infertility affects both the partners and not just one individual. Maroufizadeh et al. examined the effects of depression on life of survivors, whereas Kim et al. confirmed the effects of infertility stress, marital adjustments, and depression on resilience. Only a limited number of studies have examined the influence of resilience on the life of spouses who are infertile. In this study, effects of resilience is a foremost positive psychological factor, on the life of infertile couples; resilience is expected to be positively associated with their life. Resilience in couples experiencing infertility is quite critical to reduce the impact of stress induced by this. Nowadays as we all seen infertility is an emerging socioeconomic issue affecting an individual’s life. Hence, this study aimed to analyze the level of resilience among infertile couples. Resilience is defined as the extent to which an individual adapts to most difficult life events. In this context, “resilience” could be a suitable concept. It is defined as the individual’s psychological ability to resist and adapt to difficult life events or as a “dynamic process that induced circumferential positive adaptation within the context of compelling adversity”. That's why resilience always visible as the positive counterpart to any type of vulnerable situation. Although several definitions of resilience exist, resilient individuals can be generally characterised as possessing self-esteem, believing in one’s own self-efficacy, having a repertoire of problem-solving skills and satisfying their interpersonal relationships as well. If we seen this among infertile patients, then there is a possibility that couples involved themselves in a better life despite this infertility have a relatively very high psychological stress . So in this study a hypothesis could be formulated that couples with low resilience connected with poor quality of life. The high resilience of the involuntarily childless couples, shows a high level of psychological stability. So resilience is a strategy that will improve the quality of life of infertile couples. Studies have shown that resilience allows people to find a single meaning and concept in life and to experience an internal positive force . Resilience can most of the times plays a postive role in the lives of infertile couples. These families not only have no children, but also some points, such turbulence in the family and relationship disturbances among spouses, the feeling of being left alone by others, and being always blamed by themselves or others, can affect such couples life beacuse a type of social stigma always remain in their mind. According to the results of this study and other similar studies, training on the components of resilience leads to increase in the criterion of psychological well-being in such couples; consequently, it leads to an increase in the compromises made by such couples. Hence, it is recommended to study some kinds of interventions program to improve the mental health of infertile couples. |
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| Aim of study | To assess the level of resilience among infertile couples. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Review of Literature |
There is very few studies available related to resilience among infertile couples. Couples facing infertility are especially vulnerable to relationship dissatisfaction and heightened levels of anxiety, depression, Post-traumatic stress. (Ceballo et al., 2015; Facchin et al., 2019). Furthermore, women tend to not share their infertility distress with their partner, increasing feelings of shame, and decreasing the feeling of support from their partner (Ceballo et al., 2015).
Huppelschoten and colleagues (2013) conducted study investigating the differences in resilience among infertile partners and they found men’s were more resilient than women.
Gana and Jakubowska (2016) investigated the effects of individual’s (N = 150) infertility stress (Fertility Problem Inventory on psychological distress. The participants (male, n = 78; female, n = 72) were recruited during their initial medical interview at an infertility clinic in France. The results indicated that infertility stress significantly effects psychological distress and marital satisfaction. Particularly, increases in infertility stress contributed to decreases in marital satisfaction in the relationship (χ2 = 303.30, p < .001).
Kim and colleagues (2018) studied on the interindividual level, men’s form of coping strongly related to the marital quality of both partners, meaning that the men’s positive form of coping significantly impacted their own scores and their partner’s scores on marital quality (β = .091, p < 0.05). However, the women’s form of positive or negative coping had no impact on their partner’s marital quality (β = 1.974, p > .10). The researchers concluded that their results were in line with previous findings on relationship quality and that the scores indicated that men’s coping have more of an impact on women’s marital quality than women’s coping. |
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| Sampling | The sample of present
study consists of 50 infertile couples. The age range of participants is 30 to
40 years. Purposive type of sampling is used for the research. The data is
collected from the area of Kanpur and Lucknow. |
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| Tools Used | The level of resilience to infertility stress was determined using the Conor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC). This scale measures the resilience structure and contains 25 items rated on a five-point Likert type of scale. Based on this scale, a score of 1 was given for “Not true at all” and a score of 5 for “Always true.” The scoring range is between 25 and 125. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Statistics Used in the Study |
Descriptive type of statistics used in this study |
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| Analysis | ANOVA was used for the analysis of data
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| Result and Discussion | Table-1
Table-2
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| Findings | In the present time span most previous studies on infertile couples have focused on the effect of negative characteristics on the life of infertile couples, the current study focused on the level of resilience, a positive characteristic, among infertile couples. Previous studies have evaluated self-recognition and relationship satisfaction as well as coping strategies and distress among infertile couples. However, this study assessed the level of resilience among infertile couples. The mean value of wives on the resilience scale is 70.92 and the mean value of husbands is 82.84. Resilience is the ability to sumount from stress caused by stressful situations , the resilience that could be exist in a couple experiencing infertility is for sure indulge them in positive events. In sum, it is essential to explore how resilience affects the life of couples during the phase of infertility and they overcome being resilient. Because resilience is an important predictor and a key factor for couples’ marital satisfaction levels, it is necessary to focus on couples rather than just individuals. Husbands’ resilience scores were higher than those of wives. Resilience is closely related to positive emotions and a wife facing infertility is more sensitive to negative emotions than her husband. Therefore, husbands who were less exposed to negative emotions had higher scores in resilience than wives. With regard to effects of resilience on their life, both wife and husband showed much more significant effects. That’s why strengthening resilience is essential for improving the life of infertile couples. Therefore, it is a need of the hour to provide interventions for improving the life of infertile couples so that theycould share positive emotions with each other, they are able to tackle with the various problems involving infertility. Stress caused by infertility can be directly reduced to improve the life of infertile couples. However, resilience is a construct, plays a key role in reducing the impact of stress due to infertility and in maintaining a positive relationship and collective awareness among the couples. Moreover, resilience may be a significant factor as it acts as a arbitrator between stress caused by infertility and their life style. The items in the emotional domain caused by stress include anger, grief, loss, sadness, depression, fluctuating hope, despair, jealousy, resentment, and inability to cope, which can be defined as elements that belong to the personal realm representing the private feelings of an individual. In addition, in previous studies, in which resilience was classified as an individual domain, husbands’ depression did not significantly affect wives’ life. In summary, this study clearly identified the partner effects of infertile couples. Because the partner influence each other in terms of resilience and, it is necessary to recognize husbands and wives as interdependent beings rather than as independent beings. Furthermore, a couple should participate in various intervention events as an integrated unit, so that they can seek ways to increase their life’s quality through their resilience. There is a statistically significant difference in the mean values. Nevertheless, future research on the possible impact of the participants’ method of response should be conducted. One study validate the result of this study done by Moura-Ramos et al. also found that the level of resilience decreases as duration of infertility and duration of infertility treatment prolongs. According to studies, one of the factors affecting the psychological problems among infertile people is the use of infertility treatment methods. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Conclusion | This study identify infertile couple’s resilience on life from partner perspectives. The results showed that the resilience of infertile couples affected their life both of partners. This study found that spouses mutually influence one another in terms of resilience and life. There is an intense need to develop intervention programs involving the couples, not just individuals, its result will be that they learn to have a positive impact on each other. In conclusion we can say that it may be necessary to include resilience improvement including both the spouses as an important component in life improvement intervention programs. So that infertile couples can live their life as happily as others. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Limitation of the Study | This study had several limitations. This study only included certain area couples, and this may be a limitation because its results may not be suitably generalized for infertile couples from other cultures and populations. Second infertility of participants was confirmed via medical reports; however, the cause of infertility specified in the reports was mostly noted to be “unexplained”. Further, participants were either couples who had visited a health centres, indicating that the sample in this study is not reflective of the general population. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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