Emotional reactions to infertility diagnosis in patients and partners: Thematic and natural language processing analyses of textual data from the 1000 Dreams infertility survey

Boivin, Jacky ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9498-1708, Oguz, Mustafa, Duong, Mai, Cooper, Owen, Filipenko, Dina, Markert, Marie, Samuelsen, Carl and Renderking, William R. 2023. Emotional reactions to infertility diagnosis in patients and partners: Thematic and natural language processing analyses of textual data from the 1000 Dreams infertility survey. Reproductive BioMedicine Online 46 (2) , pp. 399-409. 10.1016/j.rbmo.2022.08.107

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Abstract

Research question : What are the emotional impacts of infertility on patients and/or partners, and how can qualitative thematic analyses (TA) and natural language processing (NLP) help evaluate textual data? Design : This was a cross-sectional, multi-country survey conducted from March to May 2019. A total of 1,944 patients and/or partners from nine countries responded to the open-ended question asking about their initial feelings related to an infertility diagnosis. A mixed-method approach that integrated NLP topic modelling and TA was used to analyse responses. Sentiment polarity, which expresses the valence of respondent sentiments in NLP, was quantified for each response. Linear regression was used to evaluate the association between patient characteristics and sentiment negativity. Results : NLP and TA showed that the most common emotional reactions to infertility diagnoses were sadness, depression, stress, disappointment, anxiety, frustration, confusion, and loss of self-confidence. NLP topic modelling found additional reactions such as shared feelings with partners, recollections about causes of infertility, and treatment experience. Responses to the open-ended question were brief (median: three words) with 71.8% conveying negative sentiments. Some respondent characteristics showed small but significant associations with sentiment negativity, such as country (Spain, China, and France were more negative than the United States), treatment engagement (no treatment was more negative than one or more treatment), and marital status (missing/other was more negative than divorced). Conclusion : Infertility diagnoses create an emotional burden for patients and partners. The mixed-method approach provides a compelling synergy in support of the validity of these findings and shows potential for these techniques in future research.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Publisher:	Elsevier
ISSN:	1472-6483
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	16 September 2022
Date of Acceptance:	28 August 2022
Last Modified:	14 Nov 2023 22:09
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/152648

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