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A national probability sample of 12- to 17-yr.-old children provided an opportunity to examine the effect of the fathers' absence on cognitive development while controlling for the major confounding factors of parental education and income. Significant differences in the outcomes measures—WISC Vocabulary and Block Design and WRAT Reading and Arithmetic—of the two groups were almost entirely due to the control variables and not the fathers' absence.
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Harris S. Goldstein (1982) studied this question.
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