RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 The production of within-family inequality: Insights and implications of integrating genetic data
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.06.06.137778
DO 10.1101/2020.06.06.137778
A1 Jason M. Fletcher
A1 Yuchang Wu
A1 Zijie Zhao
A1 Qiongshi Lu
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/06/08/2020.06.06.137778.abstract
AB The integration of genetic data within large-scale social and health surveys provides new opportunities to test long standing theories of parental investments in children and within-family inequality. Genetic predictors, called polygenic scores, allow novel assessments of young children’s abilities that are uncontaminated by parental investments, and family-based samples allow indirect tests of whether children’s abilities are reinforced or compensated. We use over 16,000 sibling pairs from the UK Biobank to test whether the relative ranking of siblings’ polygenic scores for educational attainment is consequential for actual attainments. We find strong evidence of compensatory processes, on average, where the association between genotype and phenotype of educational attainment is reduced by over 20% for the higher-ranked sibling compared to the lower-ranked sibling. These effects are most pronounced in high socioeconomic status areas. We find no evidence that similar processes hold in the case of height or for relatives who are not full biological siblings (e.g. cousins). Our results provide a new use of polygenic scores to understand processes that generate within-family inequalities and also suggest important caveats to causal interpretations the effects of polygenic scores using siblingdifference designs.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.