Father absence in low-income Mexican-American families: Children's social adjustment and conceptual differentiation of sex role attributes.

Investigated the effects of paternal deprivation on 248 4th-grade Mexican-American students. Drawings of the human figure--1 male and 1 female--were obtained from each S, following the procedures of the Goodenough-Harris Drawing Test. Ss were also administered Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices and the Bender Gestalt Test. Each S was rated on degree of personal adjustment by his/her classroom teacher on a 4-point scale, ranging from well adjusted, no problems in relating to others, to serious maladjustment. Results show that father-present Ss obtained significantly higher Goodenough-Harris scores than father-absent Ss on both the male and the female figures drawn. The female figures drawn by the father-absent Ss had significantly fewer feminine attributes than those drawn by father-present Ss. Whereas teachers found father-present males and females and father-absent females fairly well adjusted, father-absent males were found to show significantly more signs of social and emotional maladjustment than all the other 3 groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)