Events

Abstract: Genetics is relevant to social stratification because relatives are genetically related. Children receive half their genomes from each parent. On average, siblings share one-half of their genes.

The first part of the presentation presents estimates of the additive genetic (or heritability), common environmental and unshared environmental variance components (the ACE model) to a range of social stratification measures: cognitive tests, student achievement, educational and occupational attainment, income and wealth. The estimates are of data from household panel studies in which the genetic relationship between pairs of siblings in the same households has been established. The genetic components are large for many outcomes including educational and occupational attainment and to a lesser extent for income and wealth. In contrast, the contribution of the common environment is typically much smaller, often not statistically significant.

The second part of the presentation tests the sociogenetic model which predicts the correlations for pairs of relatives based on the heritability of the trait and the degree of assortative mating. For the intergenerational correlations in education, the sociogenetic model performs reasonably well. It tends to underestimate the parent-child intergenerational correlation for older cohorts, but less so for younger cohorts.  Generally, it accurately predicts the correlations across multiple generations. Sibling correlations for student performance are generally consistent with the sociogenetic model. These results presented are part of a larger study that tests the sociogenetic model for cognitive ability, achievement, occupational status, and income for both intergenerational and sibling correlations across cohorts and countries.

The Sociology Seminar Series for Michaelmas Term is convened by Christiaan Monden and Leo Azzolini.  For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.