Abstract
Numerous studies have documented a strong intergenerational transmission of educational attainment. In explaining this transmission, separate fields of research have studied separate mechanisms. To obtain a more complete understanding, the current study integrates insights from the fields of behavioural sciences and genetics and examines the extent to which paternal involvement and children’s polygenic score (PGS) are unique underlying mechanisms, correlate with each other, and/or act as important confounders in the intergenerational transmission of fathers’ educational attainment. To answer our research questions, we use rich data from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (n = 4,579). Firstly, results from our mediation analyses showed a significant association between fathers’ educational attainment and children’s educational attainment (0.303). This association is for about 4 per cent accounted for by paternal involvement, whereas a much larger share, 21 per cent, is accounted for by children’s education PGS. Secondly, our results showed that these genetic and behavioural factors are significantly correlated with each other (correlations between 0.06 and 0.09). Thirdly, we found support for genetic confounding, as adding children’s education PGS to the model reduced the association between paternal involvement and children’s educational attainment by 11 per cent. Fourthly, evidence for social confounding was almost negligible (the association between child’s education PGS and educational attainment was only reduced by half of a per cent). Our findings highlight the importance of integrating insights and data from multiple disciplines in understanding the mechanisms underlying the intergenerational transmission of inequality, as our study reveals that behavioural and genetic influences overlap, correlate, and confound each other as mechanisms underlying this transmission.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e0267254 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-21 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| Journal | PLoS ONE |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue number | 12 December |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 12 Dec 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The present study was supported by a grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research to RK (NWO MaGW VIDI; grant no. 452-17-005) (https://www.nwo.nl/en) and by a grant from the European Research Council to RK (ERC StG; grant no. 757210) (https://erc.europa.eu/). Add Health is directed by Robert A. Hummer and funded by the National Institute on Aging cooperative agreements U01 AG071448 (Hummer) and U01AG071450 (Aiello and Hummer) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Waves IV data are from the Add Health Program Project, grant P01 HD319121 (Harris) from Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Verweij, Keizer. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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