Disadvantaged social context, especially poverty, is associated with well-documented negative consequences for children and adolescents in the United States. Poverty is correlated with dropping out of school, low academic achievement, teenage pregnancy and childbearing, poor mental and physical health, delinquent behavior, and unemployment in early adulthood. In this application, while continuing this tradition of poverty research, we attempt to illuminate one essential mechanism between poverty and adolescent outcomes. We investigate how social and demographic contexts affect the expression of heritability for a variety of educational and behavior outcomes among adolescents in the United States. We test the hypothesis that advantaged social context generally boosts and disadvantaged social context generally suppresses genetic potential for educational outcomes. Our measures of educational outcomes include college plan, grade point average, the first grade retention, high school graduation, and college attendance. Our second hypothesis concerns deviant behavior. We test the hypothesis that when adolescents have behavior choices, genetic expression will be greater, and when they do not have choices, either through social controls or through impoverished environments that do not provide a range of choices, the genetic expression will be reduced. We measure deviant behavior by smoking, drinking, drug use, delinquency, violence, and aggression. The hypotheses will be tested by estimating heritability for different social and demographic contexts using sibling data from four waves of the Add Health Study carried out in 1994, 1995, 1996, and 2000 and employing Pearson's correlation analysis, structural equation models, and the mixed models.
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