| Infertility is not merely a physiological problem; the experience of living with infertility has strong psychological, social and interpersonal components. Numerous scholars have studied these components, but typically such scholarship has emphasized one factor to the exclusion of others. In an effort to improve our understanding of how the world is transformed for the person facing infertility, this study asked participants to describe their experience of facing and coping with infertility on an Internet Bulletin Board.;Data were gathered via a Web site established for this study. I announced and briefly described my proposed research study on established Internet bulletin boards having to do with infertility. I included a link to the study within this initial posting. Interested participants were requested to complete a demographic form that was mailed directly from the Web site. Throughout the study, the participants' identities were never known or disclosed. After the "I consent" button was clicked, the participant was free to post a response to the proposed study's questions: (1) Please describe your experience of infertility and (2) How have the Internet bulletin boards impacted your experience? The participant had the opportunity to respond to other participants' posts. None chose to do so.;Six respondents participated in the study. Five submitted demographic information. Out of those that completed the demographic inquiry, all were Caucasian women, ranging from 22 to 29 years of age. All were married; the duration of their marriages ranged from two to nine years. Four of the five indicated their educational background: one was a college graduate, one was currently a college student, one had vocational training, and one was a high school graduate. Three of the participants learned of the study through my posting to a bulletin board they frequent, one heard about the study through a friend, and one declined to comment on how she learned of the study.;The posts in response to the research and interview questions were treated as protocols. An interpretive summary was constructed for each participant and common themes across the responses were developed.;The descriptions of the experience by individuals experiencing infertility provided the first step toward understanding the phenomenon. The second step, my interpretation, respected participants' descriptive accounts and expanded them by describing their contexts of meaning. The third step involved reflection on the researcher's role within the research.;Through a comparative analysis of the data, nine themes emerged: (1) struggles with an identity crisis, (2) resulting emotional hardships, (3) testing the limitations of their personal control, (4) perceiving a sense of blame, and (5) integrating of their experience of failure, (6) feeling isolation from the fertile world, (7) being welcomed into the infertile community, including that of the online bulletin boards, (8) heightening of sensitivity toward others, and (9) experiencing hope in spite of the vulnerabilities associated with infertility. Through the common ground of these themes, a picture of the lived experience of infertility for these six women is presented. |
