Father absence: Effects of stepfathers upon psychosocial development in males.

Abstract

While a considerable amount of research has been reported documenting the effects of father absence upon children (see Herzog & Sudia, 1973), very little is known about the effects of surrogate paternal models upon the development of children who have experienced a period of father absence. The role surrogate models can play in the subsequent development of children who have experienced the absence of one parent requires serious consideration, since the number of young children growing up under these circumstances has increased. Moreover, given the salience of the father as a model to identify with or to imitate, the presence of a new adult male figure in the family following father absence should affect the development of the child's personality. What is known about the effects of surrogate paternal models upon fatherless children comes from the few studies that have included small subsamples of father-absent children with older brothers or father substitutes in their experimental designs (e.g., Santrock, 1972). The results of these studies suggest that the presence of an older brother or father substitute may positively affect the development of both cognitive abilities and selected sex-typed behaviors in children without fathers. The present study was undertaken because no study has convincingly demonstrated the effects of stepfathers upon the more affectively based aspects of personality where father absence has been shown to have explicitly negative effects (Biller, 1970). Its purpose was to assess the impact of stepfathers upon the psychosocial development of late-adolescent males. It was hypothesized that males with stepfathers would attain levels of psychosocial functioning equivalent to that of father-present males. It was further expected that the functioning of subjects without stepfathers would be at levels significantly below that evidenced by subjects in the other two groups.