Contributions of emotion-focused and problem-focused coping, marital adjustment, and social support on Taiwanese women's distress while undergoing assisted reproductive technologies

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2002-12

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Wang, Yaohua

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This research examined changes in and relative contributions of coping, marital adjustment, and social support on Taiwanese women's experience of distress during three stages of an assisted reproductive technology (ART) cycle. Lazarus and Folkman's theory of stress and coping (1984) was used to guide this study. A longitudinal repeated measures study design was used. Seventy-four married Taiwanese women, aged 25-45, receiving ART were recruited and data were collected at ovulation stimulation, embryo transfer, and the day of the pregnancy test but before the results were given. The Ways of Coping viii Questionnaire, the Infertility-Specific Distress Scale, the Taita Symptom Checklist, the Dyadic Adjustment Scale, and the Personal Resource Questionnaire-85 were used in this study. Results showed statistically significant changes in problem-focused coping and social support scores across the three data collection times. Additionally Problem-Focused Coping (PFC) was used less frequently than Emotion-Focused Coping (EFC) across all three time periods; however, PFC use was most frequent at embryo transfer. Social support decreased as women progressed toward the end of the ART cycle. No significant changes in emotionfocused coping, marital adjustment, and infertility-specific distress scores across the three measurement times were found. Findings indicated that social support moderates the relationships between coping and infertility-specific distress and between coping and psychological symptoms. A linear combination of the PFC and EFC, marital adjustment, and social support explained 25.4% (p<.05) of the variance in infertility-specific distress at time 1 and 17.3% (p<.05) of the variance at time 2. Additionally, 36.5 % of the variance in Taita Symptom Checklist (TSC) scores was accounted for by the above linear combinations. PFC was the major predictor of infertility-specific distress at time 1 and time 2 and for severity of psychological symptoms at time 3. Thus, Taiwanese women in this sample employed both emotion-focused coping ix and problem-focused coping to manage the distress of ART treatments, however, women who perceived less social support were likely to experience higher levels of infertility-specific distress than were the other women in the sample

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