New Edition of Getting Pregnant When You Thought You Couldn't

The Getting Pregnant Quiz

The Getting Pregnant Quiz, is a 10-item questionnaire that can help you find out how you deal with your infertility. Your answers to the quiz will help you map out your Psychological Getting Pregnant Profile. Using this information you can pinpoint any attitudes and behaviors that stand in your way. [i]

Please take a few minutes now to complete the quiz. Then score your answers. Before you begin, we recommend that you photocopy the quiz so you can retake it after you have completed the book and begun to incorporate the Pointers into your life. By the time you finish this book, you will have two books: the one you bought and the one you create as you photocopy pages and make your own personal notebook.

THE GETTING PREGNANT QUIZ

Directions:

The Getting Pregnant Quiz allows you to examine how you deal with your infertility. There are no right or wrong answers. Each question has four choices. Pick the one that best represents how you act or what you believe. Read the questions carefully. Then circle the number of the response that best represents your choice. If you feel that an item does not apply to you (e.g. the item asks about how you and your partner work as a team and you are a single woman with no partner), just skip the item.

1. How educated are you about the diagnostic tests, medications, side effects, and treatments for infertility?

Extremely well educated
Moderately well educated
Slightly educated
Not at all educated

2 How well are you able to identify your feelings about infertility and accept them as "OK"?.

Extremely able to do this
Moderately able to do this
Slightly able to do this
Not at all able to do this

3 If you ever find yourself having unrealistic or unreasonable ideas about infertility (such as "My infertility is a punishment for an affair that I had five years ago"), how well are you able to challenge these unrealistic or unreasonable views?

Extremely able to do this
Moderately able to do this
Slightly able to do this
Not at all able to do this

4. How able are you and your partner to work together as a team and support one another through infertility?.

Extremely able to do this
Moderately able to do this
Slightly able to do this
Not at all able to do this

5 How able are you to give yourself permission to avoid stressful family and social situations, and organize your social life accordingly?

1. Extremely able to do this

2. Moderately able to do this

3. Slightly able to do this

4. Not at all able to do this

6 How able are you to be an active consumer and a partner to your physician in your infertility treatment?

1. Extremely able to do this

2. Moderately able to do this

3. Slightly able to do this

4. Not at all able to do this

7 How able are you to organize your record keeping of treatment, insurance payments, and receipts?.

1. Extremely able to do this

2. Moderately able to do this

3. Slightly able to do this

4. Not at all able to do this

8. How able are you to develop a long-range plan (six months or so) that identifies how much money you are willing to spend on treatment, how long you want to remain in treatment, how much physical and emotional trauma you are willing to withstand, and how able are you to reassess this plan after six months?

1. Extremely able to do this

2. Moderately able to do this

3. Slightly able to do this

4. Not at all able to do this

9. When faced with an either/or decision in terms of treatment options, doctor or clinic selection, or moral, legal, or insurance choices, how able are you and your partner to make a decision in a timely manner?

Extremely able to do this
Moderately able to do this
Slightly able to do this
Not at all able to do this

10. To what extent are you able to "hang in" despite setbacks so long as you have the resources to do so and your goal is still to try to get pregnant? (While it is important to maintain a stance of cautious and realistic optimism, it is equally important to confront the emotional, physical, and psychological costs of pursuing a goal that may appear, and might actually be, elusive and unrealistic.).

1. Extremely able to do this

2. Moderately able to do this

3. Slightly able to do this

4. Not at all able to do this

Scoring Sheet

Each of the 10 items corresponds to one of the 10 pointers. In the scoring sheet below, enter your score for each of the 10 items in the column labelled PRETEST. After reading this book and practicing the activities in it, try taking the Quiz again and then entering your score in the Column labeled POSTTEST.

POINTER	PRETEST:	POSTEST
1. Educate yourself about Infertility
2. Get in touch with your feelings
3. Change your thinking
4. Work As A Team
5. Manage Your Social Life
6. Get in touch with your feelings
7. Get Organized
8. Make A Plan
9. Make Decisions
10. Don't give up
TOTAL (add up the points from all 10 items)

Put a bookmark on the page that contains your Total Score. Refer back to this page as you read about each of Ten Pointers. As you make your way through the infertility maze, keep in mind that your job is to help yourself through your infertility. By incorporating these Ten Pointers into your daily life, you can gain some control of a situation that is often considered uncontrollable. You can help yourself stay strong, active and optimistic as you seek and undergo treatment. You can empower yourself.

^[i] In the first edition of Getting Pregnant When You Thought You Couldn't. we used a 36 item Getting Pregnant quiz. Subsequently, our research has revealed that some of the items on the 36 question inventory were ambiguous. We also learned that we could get useful information more rapidly from a 9 item inventory where each item represented one of the pointers. We used the 9 item inventory for a survey of a large international sample that we conducted on the Internet. We found that responses to the inventory as a whole as well as to many of the individual items was highly correlated with how depressed people felt. The more people followed our pointers, the less depressed they felt.

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This page was last modified 06/02/03