In this research article by Sarah E. Bergen, Charles O. Gardner, and Kenneth S. Kendler, the researchers chose to explore genetic influences on people’s behavior during their adolescence and their young adult years. They examined primary research that minimized the age-to-age error variability.  They look at externalized behaviors, anxiety symptoms, depressive symptoms, IQ, and social attitudes and nonsignificant increases for alcohol consumption, and nicotine initiation. To help them distinguish between the possibilities they used longitudinal studies, all together helping them look at not just one point in a person’s life to find if environment makes significant changes to a person but looking at the differences across a lifespan. They also only studied phenotypes that have been repeatedly studied to, what I assume, maximize the accuracy of their findings. They focused on the ages between 13 and 25, they mention that during childhood children are affected by the environment that their parents may keep them but as we get older and have more freedom to change our surroundings this is where we might start seeing changes in heritability. They chose this because those are times in our lives where our dynamics and environment are most likely to change the most.

The researcher’s topic is of changes in adolescents and young adults is narrowed by their search to determine whether measures of heritability for a variety of phenotypic domains manifest increases over time. They used meta-analysis, through their collections of different forms of research to study, to get their data which was reports of acts, behaviors, or events. They gathered their data using public records and once everything was collected thematic analysis would have been best used for this information because they were looking for themes or relationships between their data.

I thought this research was very interesting, it was different data that I have been seeing on my topic which I really enjoyed. What I found most interesting I think was that in their results they found that there was actually significant heritability differences between males and females in terms of their externalized behaviors. I thought it was interesting because so far in class we haven’t seen much significant differences between the sexes so I was a bit shocked to see it was detected in this research.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2f07/49f79825120fb6296cdd97bcd7273a99ae51.pdf