Studying how genetic predispositions come together with environmental factors has great potential for advancing our understanding of complex social and behavioral outcomes. It represents a clear theoretical advance over studying these factors in isolation. However, research at the intersection of multiple fields creates many challenges. The goal of this website is to provide a user-friendly introduction to conducting gene-environment interaction research. Virtually everything that is presented here can be found in a variety of alternate sources, and we provide a more exhaustive list of references (link) that expound on a number of the covered topics. Our goal here is to bring together various concepts relevant to the study of gene-environment interaction into one location.
To that end, the website is broken up into several sections. The Background sections provides an introduction to GxE research in historical context, and reviews some of the reasons this area of research has become so controversial. It also provides some basic background on human molecular genetics and genetic study designs, which we thought would be useful for social scientists who are interested in starting work in this area. The Study Design section contains information about designing a study that investigates gene-environment interaction, covering topics ranging from the selection of outcomes, genotypes, and environments, as well as considerations surrounding power. The Data Analysis section is the most substantive section, with detailed step-by-step guidelines about how to conduct GxE analyses under a variety of conditions. Scripts for running these analyses using the R package are also included. Under Additional Materials, we provide a glossary of terms and references for many of the concepts introduced in this website.
By creating this website, we hope to assist social scientists in their ability to conduct high quality GxE research that will advance our understanding of the development of behavioral outcomes.
Please reference this website as:
Verhulst, Prom-Wormley, Adkins, Aliev, Neale, & Dick. Gene-environment interaction (GxE) research: A website resource for social scientists. (url)
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