ArticleSociological science2015
Is the Effect of Parental Education on Offspring Biased or Moderated by Genotype?
Article in Sociological science, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 50 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
50 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Robust genetic nurture effects on education: A systematic review and meta-analysis based on 38,654 families across 8 cohorts.American journal of human genetics · 2021Pooled it
- Parental characteristics and offspring mental health and related outcomes: a systematic review of genetically informative literature.Translational psychiatry · 2021Pooled it
- Trial
- Are Education, Socioeconomic Status, and Household Size Dependent Variables Influencing the Developmental Origins of Inflammatory Bowel Disease?United European gastroenterology journal · 2025Article
- Polygenic prediction of occupational status GWAS elucidates genetic and environmental interplay in intergenerational transmission, careers and health in UK Biobank.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Controlling for polygenic genetic confounding in epidemiologic association studies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Intergenerational transmission of health inequalities: towards a life course approach to socioeconomic inequalities in health - a review.Journal of epidemiology and community health · 2024Review
- Interaction of family SES with children's genetic propensity for cognitive and noncognitive skills: No evidence of the Scarr-Rowe hypothesis for educational outcomes.Research in social stratification and mobility · 2024Article
- Controlling for polygenic genetic confounding in epidemiologic association studies.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Social Background Effects on Educational Outcomes-New Insights from Modern Genetic Science.Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie · 2024Article
- Decoupling genetics from attainments: The role of social environments.Economics and human biology · 2023Article
- Intergenerational educational trajectories and inequalities in longevity: A population-based study of adults born before 1965 in 14 European countries.SSM - population health · 2023Article
- Maximizing the value of twin studies in health and behaviour.Nature human behaviour · 2023Review
- Genetic nurture versus genetic transmission of risk for ADHD traits in the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study.Molecular psychiatry · 2023Article
- Schooling substantially improves intelligence, but neither lessens nor widens the impacts of socioeconomics and genetics.NPJ science of learning · 2022Article
- Social and genetic associations with educational performance in a Scandinavian welfare state.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Challenging the utility of polygenic scores for social science: Environmental confounding, downward causation, and unknown biology.The Behavioral and brain sciences · 2022Article
- Incarceration, polygenic risk, and depressive symptoms among males in late adulthood.Social science research · 2022Article
- Genetic effects on educational attainment in Hungary.Brain and behavior · 2022Article
- Gene-environment Interactions and School Tracking during Secondary Education: Evidence from the U.S.Research in social stratification and mobility · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
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.
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