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）：处境不利的社会环境，尤其是贫困，与美国儿童和青少年的负面影响有关。贫困与辍学，学术成就低，少年怀孕和生育，精神和身体健康，犯罪行为不良以及成年初失业相关。在此应用程序中，在继续这种贫困研究的传统的同时，我们试图阐明贫困和青少年结果之间的一种基本机制。我们调查了社会和人口环境如何影响美国青少年中各种教育和行为成果的遗传力的表达。我们检验了这样一个假设，即优势的社会环境通常会促进和处境不利的社会环境，通常会抑制教育结果的遗传潜力。我们的教育成果措施包括大学计划，平均成绩，一年级保留，高中毕业和大学出勤。我们的第二个假设涉及偏差行为。我们检验了以下假设：当青少年有行为选择时，遗传表达将会更大，当他们没有选择，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，遗传表达将减少。我们通过吸烟，饮酒，吸毒，犯罪，暴力和侵略来衡量行为。这些假设将通过在1994年，1995年，1996年和2000年进行的四个添加健康研究的同胞数据中估算不同的社会和人口统计环境的遗传力，并采用Pearson的相关性分析，结构方程模型以及混合模型。