Pathways of Intergenerational Transmission of Advantages during Adolescence: Social Background, Cognitive Ability, and Educational Attainment

Temporal changes in the associations between diagnosed psychiatric disorders and dropping out of school early

Psychiatric problems are risk markers for poor educational attainment. The number of adolescents receiving treatment has increased. We investigated whether the association between psychiatric problems in early adolescence and dropping out of school had changed. We used the register-based 1987 and 1997 Finnish Birth Cohort studies, which include all live births in Finland. Hospital districts with incomplete records were excluded, leaving 25,421 participants born in 1987 and 32,025 born in 1997. The main outcome was not having applied for secondary education by the year the cohort members turned 18. Our main predictors were psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders diagnosed by specialized services during 1998-2003 and 2008-2013, when the cohort members were 10-16 years old. We found that 511 (2.0) of subjects born in 1987 and 499 (1.6%) born in 1997 dropped out of school. Having any diagnosis at 10-16 of age was associated with dropping out of school early in both cohorts: 3.9% in 1987 and 4.8% in 1997. The highest proportions were in the subgroup with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), 19.4% in 1987 and 16.2% in 1997. Dropping out early increased among adolescents diagnosed with any psychiatric or neurodevelopmental disorder, from 3.9 to 4.8%, with the clearest increase for learning disabilities, from 3.4 to 9.0%. Dropping out decreased for those with depression, from 4.5 to 2.1%. Adolescents with psychiatric and especially neurodevelopmental disorders, need effective interventions to prevent them dropping out of school early. Increased detection of psychopathology did not result in decreased dropout rates.

Testing for SES differences in the responsiveness of educational expectations in a twin design

In this article I test whether students' educational expectations respond to prior academic performance and whether this responsiveness varies by socio-economic status (SES). The responsiveness of high-SES students' expectations may be lower as suggested by the compensatory advantage mechanism or higher because of alienation processes of low-SES students. However, the association between achievement and expectations may be in part spurious because of unobserved social and genetic confounders. This issue is largely ignored by previous research. Therefore, in this paper I estimate behavioral genetic twin models that take into account the possible confounding of the responsiveness of expectations to performance by unobserved genetic and social influences. While students' expectations respond to prior performance, this responsiveness is reduced by more than half once unobserved genetic and social confounders are accounted for. Also, SES differences in responsiveness to performance are completely accounted for by high-SES students' expectations being less responsive to prior levels of cognitive ability. So, this study shows the relevance of taking different types of confounding into account when studying the formation of educational expectations.

The role of recent refugees' educational selectivity in their children's educational decisions in Germany

This paper uses the example of newly arrived refugees to examine the role of recent migrants' educational selectivity in their children's educational decisions in Germany. Building on a theoretical model that understands participation in the educational system as the sum of investment decisions of rational individuals, we assume that positively selected parents are more ambitious about having their children admitted to higher-level secondary schools. The role of parental educational selectivity should be particularly pronounced in federal states in which school administrations allow for greater parental involvement. We use data from the first and second face-to-face interviews of the Refugees in the German Educational System (ReGES) project, with an analytical sample of 1,437 adolescents who came to Germany from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran between 2014 and 2017. To generate a household-level index of educational selectivity, we furthermore rely on various country-of-origin-specific data that we aggregate as reference educational distributions. We run linear probability regression models to analyze the role of parents' educational selectivity in adolescents' school placement. Our findings suggest that parental educational selectivity is beneficial beyond parents' absolute educational levels for adolescents' higher-level school placement. Among the five German federal states represented in our analytical sample, the role of parental selectivity is particularly pronounced in two federal states in which parents are provided with greater possibilities to become involved in their children's educational decisions.

The intergenerational transmission of educational attainment: A closer look at the (interrelated) roles of paternal involvement and genetic inheritance

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.

The multiple mediators of early differences in academic abilities by parental financial resources in Germany

This paper examines the mediators of differences in academic abilities by parental income and wealth among pre-schoolers in Germany. Families' investment, parental stress and parenting, neighbourhood effects, and parents' educational norms and aspirations are considered as mediators. Unlike most existing studies, we explicitly consider the interdependence of these mediators and, therefore, apply sequential joint mediation analysis. We find that children in income-poor households score up to 0.34 standard deviations lower and children in households with a negative net worth up to 0.24 standard deviations lower in tests of academic ability, even when controlling for a comprehensive set of other familial characteristics. All mediators together explain on average 47% of the differences by income, but only 17% of the wealth differences. Parental investment is the most important mediator, followed by neighbourhood effects. Parental Stress, mother-child interaction quality, and educational norms and aspirations seem to be less relevant as mediators.

Do academic ability and social background influence each other in shaping educational attainment? The case of the transition to secondary education in Germany

Studies examining the interplay between children's academic ability and parental background are rare, and their findings are mixed and inconclusive. This paper addresses possible reinforcing or compensating relationships between child characteristics and parental social background in their influence on the transition to upper secondary education, the most important transition in the German school system. We use the German TwinLife data for genetically informed analyses and include comprehensive information on parental background as well as child cognitive ability and personality. We find no evidence for a significant influence of reinforcing or compensatory interactions in addition to the strong additive effects of child and parental characteristics. The ACE decomposition with covariates shows an almost equal influence of genetic variation and shared environments. However, indicators of child academic ability and parental background contribute only a little to explaining both contributions. Interestingly, the influence of child characteristics on enrollment in upper secondary school works mainly through environmental rather than genetic effects.

"Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated": Behavior Genetics in the Postgenomic Era

Behavior genetics studies how genetic differences among people contribute to differences in their psychology and behavior. Here, I describe how the conclusions and methods of behavior genetics have evolved in the postgenomic era in which the human genome can be directly measured. First, I revisit the first law of behavioral genetics stating that everything is heritable, and I describe results from large-scale meta-analyses of twin data and new methods for estimating heritability using measured DNA. Second, I describe new methods in statistical genetics, including genome-wide association studies and polygenic score analyses. Third, I describe the next generation of work on gene × environment interaction, with a particular focus on how genetic influences vary across sociopolitical contexts and exogenous environments. Genomic technology has ushered in a golden age of new tools to address enduring questions about how genes and environments combine to create unique human lives.

Is there something special about twin families? A comparison of parenting styles in twin and non-twin families

Twin comparisons offer a powerful quasi-experimental design to study the impact of the family of origin on children's life chances. Yet, there are concerns about the generalizability of results obtained from twin studies because twin families are structurally different and twins have a genetic resemblance. We examine these concerns by comparing mothers' reports on their parenting styles for twin and non-twin children between twin and non-twin families, as well as within twin families. We use two German studies for our comparisons: TwinLife and pairfam. Our results demonstrate that twins receive more differential treatment and more emotional warmth than non-twins; however, these differences are largely accounted for by age differences between children. Overall, our results indicate that results on parenting obtained from twin studies can be generalized to non-twin families.

Poor academic performance in offspring of survivors with childhood or adolescent central nervous system tumor in Sweden

The number of children who were born after their parents were diagnosed with central nervous system (CNS) tumor is increasing, but it remains largely unknown regarding the academic performance of these children. We aimed to investigate whether children of survivors with childhood or adolescent CNS tumor were associated with poor academic performance. Children of survivors of CNS tumor were identified by combining the nationwide Swedish Cancer Register and the Multi-Generation Register, and those who have completed compulsory education in Sweden between 1989 and 2015 were included in our study. "Poor academic performance" was defined as a z-score of the academic performance below the 10th percentile. Conditional logistic regression and quantile regression were used to examine the association. A total of 655 children were born after their parental diagnosis of CNS tumor and they had 1.39 times higher risk of achieving poor academic performance as compared to the matched comparisons (95% CI = 1.10-1.76). The poor academic performance was even more pronounced in boys, among those with a paternal diagnosis of CNS tumor and those with a parental ependymoma. The observed association differed depending on preterm birth. In addition, the strength of the association declined with the increased quantiles of academic performance z-score. Our data suggest that parental CNS tumor affects the subsequent academic achievements among children born after the parental tumor.

The German Twin Family Panel (TwinLife)

The German Twin Family Panel (TwinLife) is a German longitudinal study of monozygotic and dizygotic same-sex twin pairs and their families that was designed to investigate the development of social inequalities over the life course. The study covers an observation period from approximately 2014 to 2023. The target population of the sample are reared-together twins of four different age cohorts that were born in 2009/2010 (cohort 1), in 2003/2004 (cohort 2), in 1997/1998 (cohort 3) and between 1990 and 1993 (cohort 4). In the first wave, the study included data on 4097 twin families. Families were recruited in all parts of Germany so that the sample comprises the whole range of the educational, occupational and income structure. As of 2019, two face-to-face, at-home interviews and two telephone interviews have been conducted. Data from the first home and telephone interviews are already available free of charge as a scientific use-file from the GESIS data archive. This report aims to provide an overview of the study sample and design as well as constructs that are unique in TwinLife in comparison with previous twin studies - such as an assessment of cognitive abilities or information based on the children's medical records and report cards. In addition, major findings based on the data already released are displayed, and future directions of the study are presented and discussed.

The pathways from parental and neighbourhood socioeconomic status to adolescent educational attainment: An examination of the role of cognitive ability, teacher assessment, and educational expectations

Adolescents with high educational attainment generally have better outcomes across the lifespan than adolescents with lower educational attainment. This study investigated how three measures of socioeconomic status (SES)–maternal education, paternal education, and neighbourhood SES–combined to predict adolescent educational attainment (track level at age 17). We proposed three mechanisms for this pathway: cognitive ability (at age 11), primary school teacher assessment (stating the secondary education level suitable for a child at age 11), and educational expectations (at age 14). Using the data of 2,814 Dutch adolescents from the Prevention and Incidence of Asthma and Mite Allergy (PIAMA) study, logistic regressions tested associations between SES and educational attainment. Structural equation modelling (SEM) tested mediational pathways between SES and educational attainment. In models with three SES measures, having a medium-educated mother was associated with higher educational attainment relative to having a low-educated mother (OR; 95% CI: 1.83; 1.41–2.38), and having a high-educated mother was associated with higher educational attainment relative to having a low-educated mother (OR; 95% CI: 3.44; 2.59–4.55). The odds ratios for paternal education showed a similar pattern. We found no association between neighbourhood SES and adolescent educational attainment, so neighbourhood SES was removed from further analyses. Mediational analyses revealed that cognitive ability (30.0%), teacher assessment (28.5%), and educational expectations (1.2%) explained 59.8% of the total association between parental SES and educational attainment. The results showed that mother education and father education were both important for understanding the strong association between parental SES and adolescent educational attainment. In the Netherlands, the association between parental SES and educational attainment can be largely explained by cognitive ability and teacher assessments.

Sociogenomics in the 21st Century: An Introduction to the History and Potential of Genetically-informed Social Science

This article reviews research at the intersection of genetics and sociology and provides an introduction to the current data, methods, and theories used in sociogenomic research. To accomplish this, I review behavioral genetics models, candidate gene analysis, genome-wide complex trait analysis, and the use of polygenic scores (sometimes referred to as polygenic risk scores) in the study of complex human behaviors and traits. The information provided is meant to equip readers with the necessary tools to: (1) understand the methodology employed by each type of analysis, (2) intelligently interpret findings from sociogenomic research, and (3) understand the importance of sociologists in the ever-growing field of sociogenomics. To unify these three tasks, I rely on various examples from recent sociogenomic analyses of educational attainment focusing on social stratification and inequality.