Family histories and establishing of daily life after fertility treatment

The purpose of this project is to analyse socio-demographic consequences of fertility treatment; a medical treatment to which great expectations are attached both from the couples who want to have a child and from the medical profession responsible for the treatment. The analysis will focus on the couples’ life histories as regards family forms compared to other couples, their way of establishing a daily life with or without children, viewed in relation to the result of fertility treatment and the partners’ mutual communication strategies and coping before and after the treatment.

The project consists of two sub-projects. The one sub-project focuses on those couples who deliberately stop further treatment without having a child investigating their reasons related to the value of a child for man and woman. The post. doc. project will provide general knowledge on whether and how all the couples in the study manage to continue a family life after the treatment, and, further, how the couples who do not get a child during the treatment, cope with their situation and whether they may include children in their family in another way.

Both projects will primarily be based on already existing information in the COMPI-cohort data set including couples, who initiated a new period of fertility treatment in Denmark during 2000-2001.

The project is funded by a grant from The Danish Council for Independent Research | Social Sciences.