Abstract
The bio-demographic literature has begun to use genome wide summary scores (polygenic scores) to predict a broad set of demographic and socioeconomic outcomes to understand the importance of genetics as well as potential life course mechanisms. However, a largely unacknowledged issue with these studies is that parental genetics impact both child environments and child genetics, leaving the effects of polygenic scores difficult to interpret. This paper uses multi-generational data that collected parental polygenic scores and child outcomes for 30,000 adopted and biological children, which allows us to separate the influence of parental polygenic scores on children outcomes between environmental (adopted children) and environmental and genetic (biological children) effects. Our results show large effects of parental polygenic scores on adopted children’s schooling, suggesting that polygenic scores combine genetic and environmental influences and that additional research designs will need to be used to separate these estimated impacts.
Footnotes
1 This research uses data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since 1991, the WLS has been supported principally by the National Institute on Aging (AG-9775, AG-21079, AG-033285, and AG-041868), with additional support from the Vilas Estate Trust, the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since 1992, data have been collected by the University of Wisconsin Survey Center. A public use file of data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study is available from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison, Wisconsin 53706 and at http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/wlsresearch/data/. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors.
This research was supported by core grants to the Center for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (P2C HD047873) and to the Center for Demography of Health and Aging at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (P30 AG017266)
The authors thank Ron Lee and participants at the Population Association of America 2018 conference for helpful suggestions.