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

ABSTRACT: 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.

SUBMITTER: Conley D

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5644503 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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

Conley Dalton D Domingue Benjamin W BW Cesarini David D Dawes Christopher C Rietveld Cornelius A CA Boardman Jason D JD

Sociological science 20150225 6

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 edu ...[more]

PMID: 29051911

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Project description:AIMS:We tested whether parental alcohol use disorder (AUD) predicted adult offspring's likelihood of marriage and marriage to an AUD-affected spouse; whether effects differed as a function of the sex or number of affected parents; and whether they were robust to confounders. DESIGN:Sex-stratified Cox and logistic regression models. SETTING:Sweden. PARTICIPANTS:A total of 1?171?070 individuals (51.40% male) born 1965-75. MEASUREMENTS:Obtained from legal, medical and pharmacy registries. Predictor was parent AUD. Outcomes were marriage and spouse AUD. Adjustments included offspring birth year and AUD; and parental education, marriage, divorce, criminal behavior and drug abuse. FINDINGS:Male and female offspring of AUD-affected parents were more likely to marry at younger ages (< 25), illustrative unadjusted hazard ratio (HR)age 20 = 1.22 (1.17, 1.28) and 1.34 (1.20, 1.39) and were less likely to marry at older ages (> 25), HRage 30 = 0.79 (0.78, 0.81) and 0.82 (0.81, 0.84). Parental AUD was associated with higher odds of having an affected spouse for males and females, odds ratio (OR) = 1.47 (1.38, 1.57) and 1.63 (1.56, 1.70). Effects were more pronounced for those with two versus one AUD-affected parent and adjustments attenuated effects negligibly. Daughters of affected mothers (versus fathers) were more likely to have AUD-affected husbands, OR = 1.68 (1.54, 1.84) versus 1.56 (1.48, 1.64), while there was no difference in sons. CONCLUSIONS:In Sweden, parental alcohol use disorder (AUD) is associated with a higher probability of marriage at younger ages, a lower probability of marriage at older ages and a higher likelihood of marriage to an affected spouse compared with no parental AUD. Most of these effects become stronger when the number of AUD-affected parents increases from one to two, and most effects hold after controlling for parents' socio-economic status, marital history, other externalizing disorders and offspring's own AUD status. Daughters of affected mothers are more likely to have an affected spouse.

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

Publications

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

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