Is the Effect of Parental Education on Offspring Biased or Moderated by Genotype?

نویسندگان

  • Dalton Conley
  • Benjamin W. Domingue
  • David Cesarini
  • Christopher Dawes
  • Cornelius A. Rietveld
  • Jason D. Boardman
چکیده

Parental education is the strongest measured predictor of offspring education, and thus many scholars see the parent-child correlation in educational attainment as an important measure of social mobility. But if social changes or policy interventions are going to have dynastic effects, we need to know what accounts for this intergenerational association, that is, whether it is primarily environmental or genetic in origin. Thus, to understand whether the estimated social influence of parental education on offspring education is biased owing to genetic inheritance (or moderated by it), we exploit the findings from a recent large genome-wide association study of educational attainment to construct a genetic score designed to predict educational attainment. Using data from two independent samples, we find that our genetic score significantly predicts years of schooling in both between-family and within-family analyses. We report three findings that should be of interest to scholars in the stratification and education fields. First, raw parent-child correlations in education may reflect one-sixth genetic transmission and five-sixths social inheritance. Second, conditional on a child's genetic score, a parental genetic score has no statistically significant relationship to the child's educational attainment. Third, the effects of offspring genotype do not seem to be moderated by measured sociodemographic variables at the parental level (but parent-child genetic interaction effects are significant). These results are consistent with the existence of two separate systems of ascription: genetic inheritance (a random lottery within families) and social inheritance (across-family ascription). We caution, however, that at the presently attainable levels of explanatory power, these results are preliminary and may change when better-powered genetic risk scores are developed.

برای دانلود رایگان متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

The effect of parental morphine addiction on extracellular glutamate concentration of dentate gyrus in rat offspring: a microdialysis study

Addiction is a major problem of society. The existing evidences have shown that parental addiction impairs CNS development, learning, and memory. With respect to the role of glutamate in dentate gyrus on learning and memory, in this study, the effect of parental addiction to morphine on extracellular glutamate concentration in dentate gyrus was evaluated. For this purpose, male and female rats ...

متن کامل

The effect of parental morphine addiction on extracellular glutamate concentration of dentate gyrus in rat offspring: a microdialysis study

Addiction is a major problem of society. The existing evidences have shown that parental addiction impairs CNS development, learning, and memory. With respect to the role of glutamate in dentate gyrus on learning and memory, in this study, the effect of parental addiction to morphine on extracellular glutamate concentration in dentate gyrus was evaluated. For this purpose, male and female rats ...

متن کامل

Imputation of parent-offspring trios and their effect on accuracy of genomic prediction using Bayesian method

The objective of this study was to evaluate the imputation accuracy of parent-offspring trios under different scenarios. By using simulated datasets, the performance Bayesian LASSO in genomic prediction was also examined. The genome consisted of 5 chromosomes and each chromosome was set as 1 Morgan length. The number of SNPs per chromosome was 10000. One hundred QTLs were randomly distributed a...

متن کامل

Association between Maternal MTHFR Polymorphisms and Nonsyndromic Cleft Lip with or without Cleft Palate in Offspring, A Meta-Analysis Based on 15 Case-Control Studies

Background The methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) is thought to be involved in the development of nonsyndromic cleft lip with or without cleft palate (NSCL/P). However, conflicting results have been obtained when evaluating the association between maternal MTHFR C677T and A1298C polymorphisms and the risk of NSCL/P. In light of this gap, a meta-analysis of all eligible case-control stu...

متن کامل

The influence of parental divorce and alcohol abuse on adult offspring risk of lifetime suicide attempt in the United States.

The influences of parental divorce and alcohol abuse on adult offspring lifetime suicide attempt have not been examined in national data. This study analyzed data from the 2001-2002 NESARC to estimate main and interaction effects of parental divorce and alcohol abuse on lifetime suicide attempt. Adjusted for controls, parental divorce and parental alcohol abuse independently increased odds of l...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره 2  شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2015