Civic engagement has been associated with diverse health-related phenomena such as self-reported health,mortality, suicide, and teenage pregnancy. Several causal mechanisms have been proposed for this, butthey have been almost exclusively focused on environmental rather than biological or genetic causes, andthey have failed to explain a sizable portion of the variance in civic behavior. Thus, we recently investigatedthe genetic basis of civic behavior of monozygotic and dizygotic twins in the Southern California TwinRegister and found that 60-70% of the variation in voter turnout could be explained by genotypic variation.As a result, we hypothesize that heritability may play a strong role in the general predisposition to participatein civic activities, which may help to explain its association with health outcomes. Here, we propose to usethe National Study of Adolescent Health ('AddHealth') to explore the causal mechanisms underlying therelationship between civic engagement and health with an emphasis on understanding the role of socialnetworks and their genetic precursors. AddHealth has a base sample size of 90,118, and collected threewaves of data between 1994 and 2002. We have four specific aims. First, we will study phenotypic variationin measures of civic engagement in twins (in a sub-sample of 2,030 individuals) to assess the extent towhich genes play a role in voting, civic activities, and community involvement. We will also study how civicengagement is affected by genes implicated in social behavior. Second, since structural differences in localsocial networks are associated with variation in civic engagement, we hypothesize that there may be a linkbetween genotypic variation and social network position. Friendship nominations in AddHealth permit us torecreate the school-level social network and to calculate centrality, clustering, and other network statistics foreach respondent. We can then use these measures to study the genetic precursors of social networkposition. Third, given the strong relationship between social support and health, we hypothesize that at leastsome of the association between civic engagement and health can be explained by social network position.By integrating measures of social structure into models that show a relationship between health and civicengagement, we will be able to learn if civic engagement is merely a proxy for social networks or if it has anindependent association with health behaviors like smoking, drinking, and obesity. Fourth, we will identifythe extent to which civic engagement and social structure intermediate the relationship between genes andhealth behaviors. Genes clearly play a role in social behavior; thus, we hypothesize that at least some of therelationship between genes and health is intermediated by genetic variation in the formation of social tiesand the propensity to participate in community activities. Our work has implications for health behaviors likeobesity, smoking, and drinking, which are major causes of morbidity and mortality in the US. Gaining abetter understanding of the impact of civic behaviors and social networks on health behaviors is therefore ofsubstantial clinical and policy significance.
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