Universitas Indonesia Conferences, International Conference on Intervention and Applied Psychology (ICIAP) 2018

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The Lived Experience of Involuntary Childless in Indonesia: Descriptive Phenomenological Analysis
Miwa Patnani

Last modified: 2018-08-11

Abstract


Obviously, every marriage couple expected for having their own children. In many pro natalis countries, marriage without children was considered to be not a perfect marriage, so there were a pressure from the family and the community toward marriage couple to have their own children. Unfortunately, not every marriage couple have the opportunity to have their own children because of some problems with their infertility issues. Involuntary childless is a couple who don’t have any children in their marriage unintendedly. The absence of children in a marriage will have consequences in the level of individual or spouse relationship. In many cases, the absence of children was being the reason for low quality marriage ended in divorce. Many studies of involuntary childless focused on quantitative approach, which in turn did not give much information about the lived experience of involuntary childless. Also, quantitative approach did not focus on the rich information about marriage life of involuntary childless. This study was aimed to explore the lived experience of involuntary childless in Indonesia. The information of the experience provide a depth understanding about the marriage life of involuntary childless which were useful in counseling or treatment sessions. From this study we expected that we will have a better understanding what the involuntary childless really needed and how to help them having a good marriage in spite of the absence of children. In order to explore lived experience, researcher used the phenomenological approach derived from the Husserl theory, which enable us to explore the live experience of the participants. There were 6 participants of this study who were married for more than 3 years. Participants of this study were interviewed individually in a couples of time. Researcher used the interview guide to direct the interview process. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and were analyzed using descriptive phenomenological analysis. Phenomenological approach enable the researcher to focus on what was experienced by the participant and ignored all the previous knowledge. This process was known as epoche. The data from verbatim were categorized into themes that represent the essence of the experience of the participants. To be able to get to the themes, researcher have to read the verbatim many times and carefully so that they really understand what was the right theme to represent the experience. The participant’s responses were categorized into intimacy, togetherness, religiousness, family relationship and economy issue. Most of the participant were feel closer with their spouse because they frequently talk each other, spending time to do many activities together. Many participant also reported that they more religious after years of struggling to have children in their marriage. Involuntary childless also have a good finance condition, because the can save more money. Although the absence of the children have many positive impact, involuntary childless couple also face the negative impact associated with the pressure from the family for keep trying for having children in their marriage.

 

Keywords: involuntary, childless, experience, descriptive, phenomenology

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