Challenges to Identity for Women Coping with Infertility: A Thematic Co-Occurrence Analysis

Women experiencing infertility are often confronted with uncertainty about their identity as a woman, wife, or mother. This study examined how women’s identities are changed, disrupted, or challenged in response to reproductive hardship. Women coping with infertility (N = 145) wrote narrative responses about how infertility affected their identity. Preliminary analysis identified 12 themes of identity changes and challenges for participants. Secondary analyses drew upon the communication theory of identity as a framework for organizing the themes into personal (failure as a woman, responsibility for infertility, acceptance of childlessness), enactment (enacting pregnancy and parenthood, enacting sex as a chore, expressing undesirable emotion), relational (failure as wife/mother, relationship future resilience in the face of challenge), and communal (unmet cultural expectations, social comparison, isolation/withdrawal) layers of the self. Finally, a co-occurrence analysis revealed four patterns between themes within the layers of identity and five patterns among themes across identity layers. The findings have implications for helping women with infertility understand the multi-layered disruptions to their identity under these circumstances and recommending strategies for coping with identity challenges that arise in the context of infertility.