Gender dynamics, sensitive issues and ethical considerations in ‘joint interviews’ with Dutch couples undergoing fertility treatments

Titolo Rivista SALUTE E SOCIETÀ
Autori/Curatori Trudie Gerrits
Anno di pubblicazione 2018 Fascicolo 2018/2 Lingua Inglese
Numero pagine 18 P. 11-28 Dimensione file 87 KB
DOI 10.3280/SES2018-002002
Il DOI è il codice a barre della proprietà intellettuale: per saperne di più clicca qui

Qui sotto puoi vedere in anteprima la prima pagina di questo articolo.

Se questo articolo ti interessa, lo puoi acquistare (e scaricare in formato pdf) seguendo le facili indicazioni per acquistare il download credit. Acquista Download Credits per scaricare questo Articolo in formato PDF

Anteprima articolo

FrancoAngeli è membro della Publishers International Linking Association, Inc (PILA)associazione indipendente e non profit per facilitare (attraverso i servizi tecnologici implementati da CrossRef.org) l’accesso degli studiosi ai contenuti digitali nelle pubblicazioni professionali e scientifiche

Infertility and fertility treatments, including the use of In-Vitro Fertilization, are highly gen-dered: women are more often confronted with infertility in daily life, due to the cultural meaning of motherhood, and women also bear the major (physical) burden of treatment, even when the man is the cause of the fertility problem, which in turn affects the way women and men relate and communicate with each other during treatment trajectories. While previously most infertility studies focused on women, in the last decade the number of infertility studies including both women and men is increasing. Doing joint interviews with couples raises methodological and ethical questions, which are rarely discussed in infertility studies. In this article, I address these issues, taking as example joint interviews I did with heterosexual infertile couples, as part of an extended ethnographic study in a Dutch clinic. I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of doing joint interviews with couples facing fertility problems and argue that the joint interviews provide particularly good insight in the sensitive issues at stake in this field, which are often related to the gendered nature of infertility and its treatment. I contend that researchers should be reflexive about how joint interviews may have affected the study process and results. Further, researchers have to be aware of potential sensitive issues in joint interviews with infertile couples and ethical concerns should guide the research procedures. Suggestions to address these issues may also be useful for other areas in which couples are studied and sensitive issues are at stake.

Keywords:Gender; infertility; IVF; joint interviews; Netherlands; projective techniques.

  1. Arksey H. (1996). Collecting data through joint interviews. Social Research Update. University of Surrey. Retrieved from: http://sru.soc.surrey.ac.uk/SRU-15.html (Last access: 28/06/2017)
  2. Becker G. (2000). The elusive embryo. How women and men approach new reproductive technologies. Berkeley and London: University of California Press.
  3. Tjørnhøj-Thomsen T. (2009). “It’s a bit Unmanly in a Way”: Men and Infertility in Denmark. In: Inhorn M.C., Tjørnhøj-Thomsen T., Goldberg H. and Mosegaard M.C., eds., Reconceiving the Second Sex: Men, Masculinity and Reproduction. New York: Berghahn Books.
  4. Uyterlinde J. (2001). Eisprong. Amsterdam: Mets & Schilt.
  5. Valentine G. (1999). Doing household research: interviewing couples together and apart. Area, 31(1): 67-74.
  6. Verdurmen J. (1997). Keuzes bij onvruchtbaarheid. Besluitvorming bij onvruchtbare paren. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam (Unpublished PhD Disserta-tion).
  7. Verhaak C.M., Smeenk J.M.J., Van Minnen A., Kremer J.A.M. & Kraaimaat F.W. (2005). A longitudinal, prospective study on emotional adjustment before, during and after consecutive fertility treatment cycles. Human Reproduction, 20(8): 2253-2260.
  8. Thompson C. (2005). Making parents. The ontological choreography of reproductive technologies. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press.
  9. Seale C., Charteris-Black J., Dumelow C., Locock L. & Ziebland S. (2008). The effect of joint interviewing on the performance of gender. Field Methods, 20(2): 107-128.
  10. Sandelowski M., Holditch-Davis D. & Glenn Harris B. (1992). Using qualitative and quantitative methods. The transition to parenthood of infertile couples. In: Gilgun J.F., Daly K. & Handel G., eds., Qualitative methods in family research. London: Sage Publications.
  11. Sandelowski M. (1993). With child in mind. Studies of the personal encounter with infertility. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  12. Racher F.E., Kaufert J.M. & Havens B. (2000). Conjoint research interviews with frail, elderly couples: methodological implications. Journal of Family Nursing, 6(4): 367-378. DOI: 10.1177/10748407000060040
  13. Nachtigall R.D., Becker G, Wozny M. (1992). The effects of gender-specific diagnosis on men’s and women’s response to infertility. Fertility & Sterility, 57(1): 113-121. DOI: 10.1016/S0015-0282(16)54786-
  14. Morris S. (2001). Joint and individual interviewing in the context of cancer. Qualitative Health Research, 11: 553-567. DOI: 10.1177/10497320112911920
  15. Inhorn M.C. (2012). The new Arab man: emergent masculinities, technologies, and Islam in the Middle East. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
  16. Inhorn M.C. (2004). Privacy, privatization, and the politics of patronage: ethnographic challenges to penetrating the secret world of Middle Eastern, hospital-based in vitro fertilization. Social Science & Medicine, 59(10): 2095-2108.
  17. Inhorn M.C. (2003). Local babies, global science. Gender, religion and in vitro fertilization in Egypt. New York: Routledge.
  18. Greil A L., Slauson‐Blevins K. & McQuillan J. (2010). The experience of infertility: a review of recent literature. Sociology of Health & Illness, 32(1): 140-162.
  19. Greil A.L. (1997). Infertility and psychological distress: a critical review of the literature. Social Science & Medicine, 45(11): 1679-1704. DOI: 10.1016/S0277-9536(97)00102-0
  20. Greil A.L. (1991). Not yet pregnant. Infertile couples in contemporary America. New Brunswick and London: Rutger University Press.
  21. Gerrits T. (2016). Patient-Centred IVF: Bioethics and Care in a Dutch Clinic. Oxford: Berghahn Publishers.
  22. Gerrits T. (2012). Interweaving personal biography and academic work: studying infertility among ‘others’ and ‘at home’. Medische Antropologie, 24(1): 73-95.
  23. Gerrits T. (1997). Social and cultural aspects of infertility in Mozambique. Patient Education and Counselling, 31: 39-48.
  24. Franklin S. & Roberts C. (2006). Born and made. An ethnography of preimplantation genetic diagnosis. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
  25. Cronk L., Gerkey D. & Irons W. (2009). Interviews as experiments: using audience effects to examine social relationships. Field Methods, 21(4): 331-346. DOI: 10.1177/1525822X0934172
  26. Bottorf J.L., Kalaw C., Johnson J.L., Stwart M. & Greaves L. (2005). Tobacco use in intimate spaces: issues in the study of couple dynamics. Qualitative Health Research, 15(4): 564-577. DOI: 10.1177/104973230426967
  27. Boeije H.R. (2004). And then there were three: self-presentational styles and the presence of the partner as a third person in the interview. Field Methods, 16(3): 3-22. DOI: 10.1177/1525822X0325922

  • Collective Biologies pp.52 (ISBN:978-1-4780-2217-6)
  • Collective Biologies pp.181 (ISBN:978-1-4780-2217-6)
  • Collective Biologies pp.1 (ISBN:978-1-4780-2217-6)
  • Collective Biologies pp.189 (ISBN:978-1-4780-2217-6)
  • Collective Biologies pp.81 (ISBN:978-1-4780-2217-6)
  • Collective Biologies pp.155 (ISBN:978-1-4780-2217-6)
  • ‘Doing’ kinship: heterosexual parents’ experiences of non-genetic parenthood through donor conception Maria Siermann, Marja Visser, Anne Schrijvers, Monique Mochtar, Trudie Gerrits, in Reproductive BioMedicine Online /2023 pp.210
    DOI: 10.1016/j.rbmo.2022.09.006
  • Collective Biologies pp.35 (ISBN:978-1-4780-2217-6)
  • Collective Biologies pp.130 (ISBN:978-1-4780-2217-6)
  • Collective Biologies pp.106 (ISBN:978-1-4780-2217-6)

Trudie Gerrits, Gender dynamics, sensitive issues and ethical considerations in ‘joint interviews’ with Dutch couples undergoing fertility treatments in "SALUTE E SOCIETÀ" 2/2018, pp 11-28, DOI: 10.3280/SES2018-002002