The Correlates of Childhood Father Absence in College-Aged Women

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Abstract
The correlates of father absence early (before age 5) or late (between 5 and 11) in childhood were studied in a sample of college-aged women; father absence was due to either death or divorce. In comparison to father-present controls the father-absent subjects showed few deviations in such personality measures as degree of sex-role typing, attitudes toward romantic love, sex-role traditionalism, manifest anxiety, or locus of control. There did appear to be some attitudinal differences about the acceptability of sexual intercourse for the father-absent groups, but there were no differences in the amount of hetero-sexual behaviors actually reported. The father-absent subjects did not differ from the controls on various measures of nonverbal behavior to male interviewers. Reasons for the lack of agreement with a study by E. M. Hetherington are discussed; the primary factors of relevance seem to be age of the subjects at testing, SES, race, ethnicity, education, and family composition.

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