A Look at Identity, Disclosure, and Stress in Donor-Conceived Adults
Perceived stress in donor-conceived people: The role of disclosure pathway and identity. (Silva, 2026)
Silva, P. M. F. (2026). Perceived stress in donor-conceived people: The role of disclosure pathway and identity [Master’s thesis, Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciências da Educação].
Editor’s Note: This is a master’s thesis that has not undergone independent peer review. The study was conducted within and supervised by a faculty member affiliated with the MyGENESIS project. The author also discloses using AI tools to support translation, text structuring, and data analysis. I think this is the first time I’ve seen this disclosure, and I wish the use of AI was more fully described in the methods.
Geographic Region: Global
Editor’s Note: The research team is based in Portugal. The questionnaire was administered in English, and recruitment occurred through online donor conception communities and networks. Country of origin is not reported, but this methodology suggests that the study drew participants from across the globe.
Research Question: Do donor-conceived people who were told by their parents differ from those who found out on their own in how stressed they feel and how they relate to their identity? Which matters more for predicting stress: the circumstances of how someone learned about their donor conception, how they generally engage with questions of identity, or how they specifically think and feel about being donor-conceived?
Design: Quantitative, cross-sectional design using an online survey. Data were collected between December 2025 and March 2026 as part of the MyGENESIS project. The survey included questions about age, gender, education level, living situation, employment, family type, donation type, donation arrangement (anonymous, open-identity/identity-release, known donor), disclosure pathway, DNA testing, and knowledge of donor’s identity. The Perceived Stress Scale–4 (Cohen et al., 1983) assessed how unpredictable, uncontrollable, and overloaded participants felt in the past month. The Dimensions of Identity Development Scale (Luyckx et al., 2008) includes twenty-five items across five dimensions (commitment making, exploration in breadth, ruminative exploration, identification with commitment, and exploration in depth). The Donor Conception Identity Questionnaire (Jadva et al., 2025) includes twenty-three items across four dimensions (concern and preoccupation, internalized stigma, pride and acceptance, and openness and understanding). The researchers compared stress and identity scores between disclosure groups, looked at how all the variables correlated with each other, and then built a stepwise regression model to see which factors best predicted perceived stress.
Editor’s Note: The authors acknowledge that simplifying complex donor conception experiences for quantitative analysis limits interpretation of findings. For example, the analysis treated disclosure pathway as a binary variable. This means the category of “parent-led disclosure” could include a family in which parents disclosed at age three in an ongoing, supportive conversation and one in which a young adult was told once at age 26.
Sample: The main analytical sample included 137 DCP, and the regression model included 100 participants with complete data on all model variables. Overall, participants had a mean age of 38 years (range: 19–81). 78% identified as female and 19% as male. 42% held a bachelor’s degree and 30% a master’s degree. 81% came from heterosexual couple families, 10% from same-sex female couples, and 7% from single mothers by choice. Sperm donation accounted for 93% of donation types. Most participants (89%) had anonymous donors. 57% reported parent-led disclosure, 34% accidental discovery, and 2% indirect discovery. 90% had completed a DNA test, and 80% knew the identity of their donor. Participants were recruited via social media accounts and online donor conception communities.
Editor’s Note: The sample shrank from 137 to 100 because of missing data, and the author doesn’t appear to have checked whether the people who dropped out were different from those who stayed in. If the missing participants were more distressed or less engaged with their DC identity, the final sample is even more skewed than it already was.
Key Findings
Participants who were told about their donor conception by their parent(s) did not differ significantly from those who discovered it accidentally on any measure tested (i.e., perceived stress, identity development, donor conception identity).
Perceived stress was strongly linked with elements of the Dimensions of Identity Development Scale (i.e., how people were dealing with questions about their identity). People who reported higher ruminative exploration (i.e., they kept returning to unresolved questions about who they are in a worried, circular way) reported higher perceived stress. People who had made choices about their identity (commitment making) and believed those choices were meaningful (identification with commitment) reported lower perceived stress. These findings were statistically significant.
Perceived stress was also linked to aspects of the Donor Conception Identity Questionnaire. People who had higher scores for concern and preoccupation with their donor conception status reported more perceived stress. People who had higher scores for pride and acceptance and openness and understanding reported less perceived stress. These findings were statistically significant.
To understand which factors best predict how stressed a DCP feels, the researchers built a model that added a new layer of information at each step and asked: does this new layer help explain or predict stress, above and beyond everything already in the model?
Step 1 (age, gender, living with partner, employment status) explained a small but significant amount of the variation in stress levels.
Step 2 added donor conception circumstances (how someone found out, whether they’d done a DNA test, and whether they know their donor’s identity), which added almost nothing as a group.
Step 3 included scores from the Dimensions of Identity Development Scale, which prompted a large jump in the predictive power of the model. People who engaged in repetitive, unresolved questioning about who they are felt more stressed, and people who had a clearer, more settled sense of self felt less stressed.
Step 4 added scores from the Donor Conception Identity Questionnaire, which added a little more predictive power.
In the end, the full model explained about 58% of the variation in stress levels across participants. Ruminative exploration (from the Dimensions of Identity Development Scale) was the strongest predictor of higher stress, and openness and understanding (from the Donor Conception Identity Questionnaire) was the strongest meaningful predictor of lower stress. Knowing the donor’s identity was a significant positive predictor of stress in the final model, and the authors suggested that knowing the donor's identity may introduce new questions rather than resolve them.
Editor’s Note: The thesis cannot distinguish between genetic essentialism and legitimate psychological need. When a donor-conceived person says knowing their genetic origins matters to them, that is a real psychological experience. Whether it matters because humans have an evolved need for genetic knowledge, because Western culture teaches us that genetic origins are identity-constituting, or because the secrecy surrounding the information made it feel forbidden and therefore significant — the thesis has no way to distinguish between these explanations and does not try. All three would produce the same data.
Limitations: The cross-sectional design does not make it possible to determine whether challenges in identity development contribute to stress, whether stress intensifies identity development, or whether both influence each other. The perceived stress scale measures general life stress. A study about wellbeing in donor-conceived people probably needs an outcome measure that can actually detect donor-conception-specific distress. Convenience sampling through donor conception social media communities likely means the sample includes people more engaged with their donor conception identity than the broader DCP population. People who are highly engaged with this aspect of their identity may process it differently than those who rarely think about it. With 100 participants and 15 variables in the model, there aren't enough data points to trust that the results reflect something real rather than something accidental. The correlation matrix involves 45 pairwise comparisons without reported correction for multiple comparisons, which means some of the correlations may be false positives. The openness and understanding subscale of the Donor Conception Identity Questionnaire showed low internal consistency in this sample (and in previous studies), meaning its items weren't measuring the same thing reliably. The finding that openness and understanding predicts lower stress may not replicate with a better-performing measure.
Implications: For future studies, researchers should recruit larger and more diverse samples and examine the circumstances and quality of disclosure, the presence and quality of donor contact, and the extent to which these experiences are integrated into identity.
Funding Source: Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT), grant reference 2023.14465.PEX
Lead Author: Pedro Miguel Ferreira Silva is a master’s student in Educational Psychology and Human Development at the Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciências da Educação, Universidade do Porto. The thesis was supervised by Mariana Veloso Martins, a researcher affiliated with the MyGENESIS project. No personal connection to donor conception was disclosed.
Regulatory Context: Varies by jurisdiction
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