Social and Demographic Context and Heritability

社会和人口背景以及遗传力

基本信息

批准号：
6629446
负责人：
Guang Guo
金额：
$ 7.13万
依托单位：
UNIV OF NORTH CAROLINA CHAPEL HILL
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
财政年份：
2002
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2002-07-01 至 2006-06-30
项目状态：
已结题

项目摘要

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Disadvantaged social context, especially poverty, is associated with well-documented negative consequences for children and adolescents in the United States. Poverty is correlated with dropping out of school, low academic achievement, teenage pregnancy and childbearing, poor mental and physical health, delinquent behavior, and unemployment in early adulthood. In this application, while continuing this tradition of poverty research, we attempt to illuminate one essential mechanism between poverty and adolescent outcomes. We investigate how social and demographic contexts affect the expression of heritability for a variety of educational and behavior outcomes among adolescents in the United States. We test the hypothesis that advantaged social context generally boosts and disadvantaged social context generally suppresses genetic potential for educational outcomes. Our measures of educational outcomes include college plan, grade point average, the first grade retention, high school graduation, and college attendance. Our second hypothesis concerns deviant behavior. We test the hypothesis that when adolescents have behavior choices, genetic expression will be greater, and when they do not have choices, either through social controls or through impoverished environments that do not provide a range of choices, the genetic expression will be reduced. We measure deviant behavior by smoking, drinking, drug use, delinquency, violence, and aggression. The hypotheses will be tested by estimating heritability for different social and demographic contexts using sibling data from four waves of the Add Health Study carried out in 1994, 1995, 1996, and 2000 and employing Pearson's correlation analysis, structural equation models, and the mixed models.

描述（由申请人提供）：不利的社会背景，特别是贫困，与美国儿童和青少年所遭受的负面后果有充分的记录。贫困与辍学、学业成绩低下、青少年怀孕和生育、身心健康状况不佳、犯罪行为以及成年早期失业有关。在本申请中，在延续贫困研究传统的同时，我们试图阐明贫困与青少年结果之间的一个基本机制。我们调查社会和人口背景如何影响美国青少年各种教育和行为结果的遗传性表达。我们检验了这样的假设：有利的社会环境通常会促进教育成果的遗传潜力，而不利的社会环境通常会抑制教育成果的遗传潜力。我们衡量教育成果的指标包括大学计划、平均绩点、一年级保留率、高中毕业和大学出勤率。我们的第二个假设涉及异常行为。我们检验了这样一个假设：当青少年有行为选择时，基因表达会更大，而当他们没有选择时，无论是通过社会控制还是通过不提供一系列选择的贫困环境，基因表达都会减少。我们通过吸烟、饮酒、吸毒、犯罪、暴力和攻击性来衡量异常行为。这些假设将通过使用 1994 年、1995 年、1996 年和 2000 年进行的四波 Add Health 研究的同胞数据并采用 Pearson 相关分析、结构方程模型和混合模型来估计不同社会和人口背景的遗传力来进行检验。。