Birth Order, Family Size, and Intelligence

Belmont, Lillian; Marolla, Francis

doi:10.1097/00006254-197406000-00014

Cited by 72 publications

(119 citation statements)

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“…For example, the long-standing and often-observed negative relationship between birth order and intelligence that has been demonstrated in many cross-sectional data sets (e.g., Belmont and Marolla 1973) has recently been identified as a between-family effect with little if any withinfamily status. In other words, birth order (a variable measuring differences between children within families) has been a proxy within cross-sectional data sets for many between-family differences that appear to be the actual causal agents (e.g., SES, education, parental IQ, etc.).…”

Section: Previous Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Education and Cognitive Ability as Direct, Mediating, or Spurious Influences on Female Age at First Birth: Behavior Genetic Models Fit to Danish Twin Data

Rodgers

Kohler

McGue

et al. 2008

American Journal of Sociology

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The authors study education and cognitive ability as predictors of female age at first birth (AFB), using monozygotic and dizygotic female twin pairs from the Middle-Aged Danish Twin survey. Using mediated regression, they replicate findings linking education (and not cognitive ability) to AFB. But in a behavior genetic model, both relationships are absorbed within a latent variable measuring the shared family environment. Two interpretations are relevant. First, variance in AFB emerges from differences between families, not differences between sisters within the same family. Second, even in a natural laboratory sensitive to genetic variance in female fertility-during demographic transition-the variance in AFB was non-genetic, located instead within the shared environment.Biological thinking and genetic models have not often been a part of the sociologist's toolbox in the past. But this is changing (e.g., Udry 1995;Conley and Bennett 2000;Shanahan, Hofer, and Shanahan 2003). 2 Wilson (1998) introduced the concept of consilience, in which methods 1Direct correspondence to Joseph Lee Rodgers, Department of Psychology, 455 West Lindsey Street, Room 809, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma 73019. jrodgers@ou.edu. 2 Similar concerns date back further in some of the other social sciences. In economics, e.g., the use of twin data to control for unobserved genetic and other aspects of family background and, in some cases, to present heritability decompositions of phenotypes goes back at least to Behrman and Taubman (1976) and Behrman et al. (1980), with a resurgence a little over a decade ago that focused on controlling for measurement error and using monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins together to estimate intrahousehold allocation responses to individual-specific genetic endowments (Ashenfelter and Krueger 1994;Behrman, Rosenzweig, and Taubman 1994). This work in economics overlaps with the interests of sociologists; it has focused, e.g., on estimating the impact of schooling on wages and on mate selection, the impact of maternal schooling on child schooling, and the impact of fertility on happiness (Behrman and Rosenzweig 2002; Kohler, Behrman, and Skytthe 2005 and theories from different disciplines merge into metadisciplines, fringe disciplines, or subdisciplines. Wilson noted an asymmetry between the social and medical sciences, suggesting that the integration of social science methods into the medical sciences has been relatively smooth, whereas medical and biological thinking (and especially genetic reasoning) has not been as easily integrated into many areas of social science, including sociology. The emerging subdiscipline of biodemography (e.g., Vaupel et al. 1998;Rodgers and Kohler 2003;Wachter and Bulatao 2003) illustrates that this asymmetry is beginning to abate, though it bears noting that scholars from outside sociology are providing much of the impetus for this type of consilience.Social science research is filled with apparently causal relationships that, when subjected to modern sc...

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Section: Previous Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Education and Cognitive Ability as Direct, Mediating, or Spurious Influences on Female Age at First Birth: Behavior Genetic Models Fit to Danish Twin Data

Rodgers

Kohler

McGue

et al. 2008

American Journal of Sociology

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“…The research suggests that a number Effects of Matemal Employment on Intellectual Ability of Children 549 of different aspects of family size are negatively related to children's intellectual abilities: number of siblings (Belmont and Marolla, 1973;Black, 1981), birth spacing (Lindert, 1977;Zajonc, 1976;Zajonc and Marcus, 1975), and sibling order with greater negative effect from the presence of younger siblings than older siblings (Mercy and Steelman, 1982).…”

Section: Theoretical Paradigmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mother or Market? Effects of Maternal Employment on the Intellectual Ability of 4-Year-Old Children

1989

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This article uses the 1986 Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data set to investigate the impact of maternal employment on children's intellectual ability, as measured at the age of 4 by using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). Results from multivariate regression analysis show a statistically significant adverse effect of mother's employment on children's intellectual ability, but only for boys in higher income families. Furthermore, the negative impact was related to the timing of maternal employment: employment during the boys' infancy had a statistically significant negative effect on PPVT scores at the age of 4. This pattern was not found for girls, for children in low-income families, or for families in which mothers resumed their employment after the child's first year of life. The impact of other demographic trends in recent yearsdeclining fertility and rising marital instability-are also investigated. The results show an adverse effect of the presence of other siblings on children's PPVT scores; but holding family income constant, the effect of the parents' marital status on children's intellectual ability is not statistically significant. In addition, several family background factors are highly correlated with children's test scores. Three significant and interrelated demographic trends have dominated the social landscape in the United States for the past quarter-century: a dramatic rise in the labor force participation of mothers with young children, a pervasive decline in fertility rates (especially marital fertility rates), and a more than doubling of divorce rates and growing rates of transitory nonmarital cohabitation.

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“…Belmont and Marolla (1973) presented the average Raven Progressive Matrices score by birth order and family size for the entire male population of the Netherlands who attained age 19 between 1963 and 1966 (N = 386,114). The Raven scores were reported in terms of six categories, from I (high) to 6 (low).…”

Section: Data Sets On Family Configuration Factors and Intelligencementioning

confidence: 99%

The confluence model: Parameter estimation for six divergent data sets on family factors and intelligence

Zajonc

Bargh

1980

Intelligence

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Theoretical predictions, based on the confluence model, were made for data from six national surveys of intellectual performance. All six surveys relate intellectual performance scores to family configuration variables. Widely divergent patterns of relationships between the major family factors, such as birth order and family size, and intellectual performance scores characterize the six data sets. Nevertheless, the confluence model was capable of accurate prediction in all cases when all three parameters were estimated. Little accuracy was lost using only two parameters. Variations in the estimated parameter values that reflected the variations in patterns of effects could be meaningfully interpreted for their psychological significance.The effects of family configuration variables, such as family size, birth order, and spacing between siblings, on intellectual growth were recently described by means of the confluence model (Zajonc & Markus, 1975). A reparametrization of this model was subsequently employed to explicate the conflicting results reported in the birth order literature (Zajonc, Markus, & Markus, 1979). This paper reports more stringent and extensive tests of the confluence model than have been carried out thus far. A variety of data sets on the relationship between family configuration variables, such as birth order and family size on the one hand, and intellectual performance scores on the other, have been compiled and the parameters of the model were estimated for these data. These data sets, which come from large national intelligence surveys, show markedly divergent patterns of results. Thus, for example, in one data

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Birth Order, Family Size, and Intelligence

Cited by 72 publications

References 0 publications

Education and Cognitive Ability as Direct, Mediating, or Spurious Influences on Female Age at First Birth: Behavior Genetic Models Fit to Danish Twin Data

Education and Cognitive Ability as Direct, Mediating, or Spurious Influences on Female Age at First Birth: Behavior Genetic Models Fit to Danish Twin Data

Mother or Market? Effects of Maternal Employment on the Intellectual Ability of 4-Year-Old Children

The confluence model: Parameter estimation for six divergent data sets on family factors and intelligence

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