Comparing the Effectiveness of Reality Therapy and Transactional Analysis Approach on Stress Coping Strategies in Infertile Women

Infertile women face many problems in their personal lives and infertility is accompanied with many psychological injuries including increased stress, which requires to the use of psychological interventions. Therefore, present research aimed to comparing the effectiveness of reality therapy and transactional analysis approach on stress coping strategies in infertile women.

Present study was semi-experimental with pretest and posttest design with control group. The research population was infertile women who referred to Avicenna infertility clinic of Tehran city in 2018 year. The research sample was 45 people who were selected by purposive sampling method and randomly replaced in three equal groups (15 people in each group). Each experimental group separately trained 10 sessions of 90 minutes with the methods of reality therapy and transactional analysis approach and the control group did not receive any training. Data were collected with using demographic information form and Andler and Parker stress coping strategies scale and analyzed by methods of chi-square, multivariate analysis of covariance and Bonferroni post hoc in SPSS software version 22.

The findings showed that the experimental and control groups did not significant different in terms of age, education and duration of infertility (P>0.05). Also, both methods of reality therapy and transactional analysis approach led to significant increase the problem-orientation and significant decrease the emotion-orientation and avoidance strategies in infertile women (P<0.001), but between two methods there was no significant difference in improving their stress coping strategies (P>0.05).

The results showed the effectiveness both methods of reality therapy and transactional analysis approach on increasing the problem-orientation and decreasing the emotion-orientation and avoidance strategies in infertile women. As a result, clinical psychologists and therapists can use from both methods along with other treatments methods to reduce psychological injuries especially to improve stress coping strategies.