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

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 kn...

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Autores principales: Conley, Dalton, Domingue, Benjamin W., Cesarini, David, Dawes, Christopher, Rietveld, Cornelius A., Boardman, Jason D.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5644503/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29051911
http://dx.doi.org/10.15195/v2.a6
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author Conley, Dalton
Domingue, Benjamin W.
Cesarini, David
Dawes, Christopher
Rietveld, Cornelius A.
Boardman, Jason D.
author_facet Conley, Dalton
Domingue, Benjamin W.
Cesarini, David
Dawes, Christopher
Rietveld, Cornelius A.
Boardman, Jason D.
author_sort Conley, Dalton
collection PubMed
description 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.
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spelling pubmed-56445032017-10-17 Is the Effect of Parental Education on Offspring Biased or Moderated by Genotype? Conley, Dalton Domingue, Benjamin W. Cesarini, David Dawes, Christopher Rietveld, Cornelius A. Boardman, Jason D. Sociol Sci Article 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. 2015-02-25 2015 /pmc/articles/PMC5644503/ /pubmed/29051911 http://dx.doi.org/10.15195/v2.a6 Text en http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This open-access article has been published under a Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction, in any form, as long as the original author and source have been credited.
spellingShingle Article
Conley, Dalton
Domingue, Benjamin W.
Cesarini, David
Dawes, Christopher
Rietveld, Cornelius A.
Boardman, Jason D.
Is the Effect of Parental Education on Offspring Biased or Moderated by Genotype?
title Is the Effect of Parental Education on Offspring Biased or Moderated by Genotype?
title_full Is the Effect of Parental Education on Offspring Biased or Moderated by Genotype?
title_fullStr Is the Effect of Parental Education on Offspring Biased or Moderated by Genotype?
title_full_unstemmed Is the Effect of Parental Education on Offspring Biased or Moderated by Genotype?
title_short Is the Effect of Parental Education on Offspring Biased or Moderated by Genotype?
title_sort is the effect of parental education on offspring biased or moderated by genotype?
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5644503/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29051911
http://dx.doi.org/10.15195/v2.a6
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