Genetics, the Rearing Environment, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Divorce: A Swedish National Adoption Study

Abstract

We used classical and extended adoption designs in Swedish registries to disentangle genetic and rearing-environment influences on the intergenerational transmission of divorce. In classical adoption analyses, adoptees ( n = 19,715) resembled their biological parents, rather than their adoptive parents, in their history of divorce. In extended adoption analyses, offspring ( n = 82,698) resembled their not-lived-with fathers and their lived-with mothers. There was stronger resemblance to lived-with mothers, providing indirect evidence of rearing-environment influences on the intergenerational transmission of divorce. The heritability of divorce assessed across generations was 0.13. We attempted to replicate our findings using within-generation data from adoptive and biological siblings ( ns = 8,523-53,097). Adoptees resembled their biological, not adoptive, siblings in their history of divorce. Thus, there was consistent evidence that genetic factors contributed to the intergenerational transmission of divorce but weaker evidence for a rearing-environment effect of divorce. Within-generation data from siblings supported these conclusions.

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