Abstract
Infertility-related psychological research is traditionally oriented to analyze the wellbeing of couples undergoing Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART), than to study the job-related effects on the healthcare fertility staff. This piece of research aims at understanding the subjective perspective of the fertility professionals and contribute to identify their emotional dynamics in their work environment. An in-depth explorative research study was conducted on 12 healthcare professionals of an Italian ART hospital clinic. Structured interviews with open-ended questions were administered to explore their deep feelings about their professional experience. Emotional text analysis was then conducted to analyze the textual corpus of their narratives to grasp their affective symbolizations. Statistical multidimensional techniques were used to detect some thematic domains (cluster analysis) and latent factors organizing the contraposition between them (multiple correspondence analysis). Five thematic domains were detected which refer to different emotional dimensions, as follows: performance anxiety (Cluster 1), ambivalence between omnipotence and powerlessness (Cluster 2), care burden (Cluster 3), feeling of duty (Cluster 4), and sense of interdependence (Cluster 5). Then, four latent factors were identified dealing with the laborious attempt to remedy, the realistic sense of limitation, the incumbent feeling of pressure and the restorative sense of justice, respectively. The results are discussed based on the existing literature and some useful recommendations for staff education, training and clinical supervision are provided accordingly.
Highlights
Infertility-related psychological research is traditionally oriented to analyze the wellbeing of couples undergoing Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART), than to study the job-related effects on the healthcare fertility staff
The term ART refers to medical treatments used to helpcouples conceive a pregnancy when it does not occur spontaneously, such as intrauterine insemination (IUI), in vitro fertilization (IVF), and third party-assisted ART
The results of this research study allowed the identification of the main emotional dimensions characterizing the experience of the staff members of an infertility center
Summary
Study participants included twelve ART professionals working for at least 12 months in the fertility clinic of a public healthcare hospital of Rome. Clusters are labelled and interpreted by the researcher by using models of affective symbolization (Carli & Paniccia, 2002), which reveal different affective dynamics and interpersonal patterns, integrating constructivism and object relations theory (Caputo, 2013b; Caputo, 2018b; Langher, Brancadoro, D’Angeli, & Caputo, 2014) through a psychoanalytic method following an evidential and conjectural paradigm (Langher, Caputo, & Martino, 2017) In this regard, the focus of the textual analysis is on the identification of spontaneous chains of lexical associations, apart from their language context and the cognitive sense of the reported contents. This was performed through comparing different sources (outputs of analysis about both grouping of words and the most characteristic elementary context units) and procedures (to infer the symbolic-affective meanings from the statistical word co-occurrence and to contextualize such meanings in terms of related contents from the participants’ direct quotations)
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