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Title: Does Having Boys or Girls Run in the Family?
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Rodgers, Joseph Lee
Doughty, Debby
Does Having Boys or Girls Run in the Family?
Chance 14,4 (Fall 2001): 8-13
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Springer
Keyword(s): Family Studies; Fertility; Genetics; Kinship; Modeling; Pairs (also see Siblings); Siblings

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

The data on which our results are based come from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), a national survey with excellent family information. Our behavioral genetic study will compare respondents with different levels of relatedness to determine whether more closely related women are more similar in their children's sex composition than those more distantly related. We used twins, full siblings, half siblings, and cousin pairs -- all the pairs of which lived together in the same household -- to compare kinship kinship correlations indexing kinship similarity. If kinship pairs with higher genetic relatedness (e.g., twins) are more similar to one another than those with lower genetic relatedness (e.g., cousins), then this pattern is suggestive of a genetic influence. Our demographic study will compare sex composition patterns from the NLSY respondents to those that would be expected by chance. The model that will be fit explicitly distinguishes between stopping behavior caused by sex composition and the probability of a particular sex. These analyses will suggest whether certain patterns occur more often than chance can explain (e.g., whether there are more 'boy-biased' or 'girl-biased' families than would be expected under a binomial model).
Bibliography Citation
Rodgers, Joseph Lee and Debby Doughty. "Does Having Boys or Girls Run in the Family?" Chance 14,4 (Fall 2001): 8-13.