The cost of genotyping has fallen 100,000-fold over the past 20 years, and large population surveys are increasingly including genetic data alongside traditional demographic and social indicators. This genome revolution presents new opportunities for social and population scientists to leverage genetics data and contribute to the growing interdisciplinary literature about the complex relationship between social and genetic causes. In this talk, I discuss two papers that showcase potential directions for this new subfield.
The first paper introduces a genetic summary measure that improves our ability to the study gene-by-environment interplay: variance polygenic scores (vPGSs). vPGS are genetic summary measures that capture the extent to which an individual’s genes buffer their environment with respect to an outcome, or what we call genetic plasticity.
The second paper conceptualizes the genotypes of those around us matter as important contributors to our health outcomes. Leveraging as-if-random variation in grade-mates’ genomes conditional on school-level variation in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, we find that peers’ genotypes have a causal impact on adolescent smoking behavior.