Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 155 Hamilton Hall CB 3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.
Soc Sci Res. 2020 Feb;86:102387. doi: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2019.102387. Epub 2019 Nov 16.
Recently, several genome-wide association studies of educational attainment have found education-related genetic variants and enabled the integration of human inheritance into social research. This study incorporates the newest education polygenic score (Lee et al., 2018) into sociological research, and tests three gene-environment interaction hypotheses on status attainment. Using the Health and Retirement Study (N = 7599), I report three findings. First, a standard deviation increase in the education polygenic score is associated with a 58% increase in the likelihood of advancing to the next level of education, while a standard deviation increase in parental education results in a 53% increase. Second, supporting the Saunders hypothesis, the genetic effect becomes 11% smaller when parental education is one standard deviation higher, indicating that highly educated parents are more able to preserve their family's elite status in the next generation. Finally, the genetic effect is slightly greater for the younger cohort (1942-59) than the older cohort (1920-41). The findings strengthen the existing literature on the social influences in helping children achieve their innate talents.
最近，几项关于受教育程度的全基因组关联研究发现了与教育相关的遗传变异，并使人类遗传融入了社会研究。本研究将最新的教育多基因评分（Lee 等人，2018）纳入社会学研究，并测试了三种关于地位获得的基因-环境相互作用假说。利用健康与退休研究（N=7599），我报告了三项发现。首先，教育多基因评分的标准差增加会使下一阶段教育的可能性增加 58%，而父母教育的标准差增加会使可能性增加 53%。其次，支持桑德斯假说，当父母的教育程度提高一个标准差时，遗传效应会降低 11%，这表明受过高等教育的父母更有能力在下一代中保持其家族的精英地位。最后，对于年轻一代（1942-59 年），遗传效应略大于老一代（1920-41 年）。这些发现加强了关于社会影响在帮助儿童实现其内在才能方面的现有文献。
