Abstract
There is an extensive literature on the causes of educational inequalities, and the life course consequences of educational attainment. Mendelian randomization, where genetic variants associated with exposures of interest are used as proxies for those exposures, often within an instrumental variables framework, has proven highly effective at elucidating the causal effects of several risk factors in the biomedical sciences. We discuss the potential for this approach to be used in the context of social and socio-economic exposures and outcomes, such as educational attainment.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 681-688 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A: Statistics in Society |
| Volume | 183 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Early online date | 24 Nov 2019 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Feb 2020 |
Funding
The Medical Research Council and the University of Bristol support the Medical Research Council Integrative Epidemiology Unit (grants MC_UU_00011/1 and MC_UU_00011/7). The Economic and Social Research Council supported NMD via a ‘Future research leaders’ grant (ES/N000757/1). No funding body has influenced the preparation of the paper. This publication is the work of the authors, who serve as the guarantors for its content. Neil Davies and Marcus Munafò report a grant for unrelated research from the ‘Global research awards for nicotine dependence’ which is an ‘Independent competitive grants program’ supported by Pfizer. Marcus Munafò is Co-Director of Jericoe Ltd, which produces software for the assessment and modification of emotion recognition, and a consultant to Cambridge Cognition Ltd. He has received grant funding from Pfizer, and research support in kind from GlaxoSmithKline, unrelated to the work that is presented in this paper. George Davey Smith has received research funding from Sanofi, Biogen and GlaxoSmithKline for projects that are unrelated to the work that is presented in this paper.
Keywords
- Causal inference
- Education
- Genetic structure
- Mendelian randomization
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Statistics and Probability
- Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
- Economics and Econometrics
- Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty