Direct and indirect effects of perceived social support on women's infertility-related stress

Abstract

Despite being limited by a convenience sampling and cross-sectional design, results highlight the importance of social support contexts in helping women deal with infertility treatment. Health professionals should explore the quality of social networks and encourage seeking positive support from family and partners. Findings suggest it might prove useful for counselors to use coping skills training interventions, by retraining active-avoidance coping into meaning-based and active-confronting strategies.

Perception of the Psychosocial Aspects of Subfertility by Parents Following Successful Medically Assisted Conception: A Qualitative Study

“…Like ESHRE [23], Wilkes et al [34] and Martins et al [35], our study shows that understanding, support and the willingness to listen can have an important impact on the mental well-being of subfertile people. We found in our study that participants have difficulty dealing with the spontaneous pregnancy of their friends; friends who then advance into a new phase of life associated with pregnancy and childbirth.…”

Couples’ discontinuation of fertility treatments: a longitudinal study on demographic, biomedical, and psychosocial risk factors

“…The Copenhagen Multi-center Psychosocial Infertility Coping Strategy Scales (COMPI-CSS) [29], Portuguese version [30], assesses four infertility-specific coping strategies: active-avoidance, active-confronting, passive-avoidance, and meaning-based. The items are scored from 1 (not used) to 6 (used a great deal).…”

“…Moreover, studies indicating that psychological adjustment influences couples' decision to discontinue treatment use generalized measures, such as anxiety and depression [9,15,16] (exception for [24]), that do not capture the specific distress associated with the infertility experience or treatments [28]. Infertility-specific variables, such as active-avoidance coping, are known to be associated with higher infertility distress [29][30][31], and they may thus be expected to influence the decision to discontinue fertility treatment.…”

Comparison of three infertility-specific measures in men and women going through assisted reproductive technology treatment

“…Research using these measures has provided significant contributions to the literature concerning gender differences (Chachamovich et al, 2009;Peterson et al, 2003;Peterson, CR Newton, et al, 2006;Schmidt et al, 2003;Slade et al, 2007), the predicting roles of coping strategies and social support (Keramat et al, 2014;Martins et al, 2011Martins et al, , 2013Peterson, C Newton, et al, 2006; and the effect infertility-stress on marital satisfaction (Gana and Jakubowska, 2016).…”