Citation
Boardman, Jason D.; Wedow, Robbee L.; Goode, Joshua A.; Domingue, Benjamin W.; & Harris, Kathleen Mullan (2018). A social explanation for observed differences in genetic associations for years of completed education among black and white adults: The role of discrimination. Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America. Denver, CO.Abstract
Polygenic risk scores (PGS) have been developed for many traits of interest to demographers. Importantly, reported pgs-> trait correlations are typically weaker among non-Hispanic black compared to non-Hispanic white adults. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the hypothesis that differences in the experience of discrimination are implicated in the reduced correlation between genes linked to education and levels of education among non-Hispanic black compared to non-Hispanic white adults. The GxE framework hypothesizes that some exposures may dampen genetic associations and we evaluate whether discrimination may be one of these key environmental characteristics. We use recent techniques to develop a PGS for years of completed education among respondents of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Our results provide evidence that PGS is significantly less predictive among black compared to white adults and we show that discrimination is partially responsible for this difference.URL
https://paa.confex.com/paa/2018/webprogrampreliminary/Paper18455.htmlKeyword(s)
education race ethnicity discriminationReference Type
Conference proceedingBook Title
Annual Meeting of the Population Association of AmericaSeries Title
Discrimination and racial/ethnic disparities in healthAuthor(s)
Boardman, Jason D.Wedow, Robbee L.
Goode, Joshua A.
Domingue, Benjamin W.
Harris, Kathleen Mullan