Sequence analysis is an established method used to study the complexity of family life courses. Although individual and societal characteristics have been linked with the complexity of family trajectories, social scientists have neglected the potential role of genetic factors in explaining variation in family transitions and events across the life course. We estimate the genetic contribution to sequence complexity and a wide range of family demographic behaviors using genomic relatedness-based, restricted maximum likelihood models with data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study. This innovative methodological approach allows us to provide the first estimates of the heritability of composite life course outcomes-that is, sequence complexity. We demonstrate that a number of family demographic indicators (e.g., the age at first birth and first marriage) are heritable and provide evidence that composite metrics can be influenced by genetic factors. For example, our results show that 11% of the total variation in the complexity of differentiated family sequences is attributable to genetic influences. Moreover, we test whether this genetic contribution varies by social environment as indexed by birth cohort over a period of rapid changes in family norms during the twentieth century. Interestingly, we find evidence that the complexity of fertility and differentiated family trajectories decreased across cohorts, but we find no evidence that the heritability of the complexity of partnership trajectories changed across cohorts. Therefore, our results do not substantiate claims that lower normative constraints on family demographic behavior increase the role of genes.

中文翻译：

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家庭生活过程复杂性的全基因组遗传力估计。

序列分析是一种用于研究家庭生活过程复杂性的既定方法。尽管个人和社会特征与家庭轨迹的复杂性有关，但社会科学家忽视了遗传因素在解释家庭转变和整个生命过程中事件的变化方面的潜在作用。我们使用来自美国健康和退休研究的数据，使用基于基因组相关性的受限最大似然模型估计遗传对序列复杂性和广泛的家庭人口统计行为的贡献。这种创新的方法使我们能够首次估计复合生命过程结果的遗传力——即序列复杂性。我们证明了一些家庭人口统计指标（例如，第一次出生和第一次结婚的年龄）是可遗传的，并提供证据表明综合指标可能受到遗传因素的影响。例如，我们的结果表明，分化家族序列复杂性的总变异中有 11% 可归因于遗传影响。此外，我们测试了在 20 世纪家庭规范快速变化期间，这种遗传贡献是否因社会环境而异，如出生队列所索引的那样。有趣的是，我们发现有证据表明生育力和分化家庭轨迹的复杂性在不同群体之间有所降低，但我们没有发现证据表明伴侣轨迹复杂性的遗传性在不同群体之间发生了变化。所以，