Schools and the Heritability of Smoking Behaviors: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations

In this paper we develop and test theoretical models that position the social environment (both normative and institutional) as a critical component of sociological inquiry into behavioral genetics. We focus on schools as important social institutions that condition the magnitude of genetic influences on smoking behaviors. Specifically, we develop and test five hypotheses that examine gene-environment interactions using the sibling-pair data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Based on estimates using traditional quantitative genetic techniques we find that 59 percent of the variation in smoking behaviors is heritable in nature. However, when this estimate is obtained using a multi-level modeling framework with adolescent pairs nested within schools, we observe a significant reduction in the overall estimate (h = .46). Most importantly we also demonstrate significant variation in heritability across schools. We find that heritability is significantly reduced within schools characterized as having strong norms regarding smoking behaviors and within schools with limited resources.