Blackwell Reference Online

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Behavior genetics is a quantitative method, and adolescent development is a psychological topic. Treating the cross between these two arenas appears, at the surface, to require collecting research in which the method has been applied to study the topic, and reviewing that research for coherence and common themes. But the challenge is rather more difficult than the surface level view might suggest. Below the surface is a great deal of shifting sand, which makes organizing the topic difficult. Because of this instability, it is critical that we carefully and explicitly define a foundational starting point. In the introduction to this article, we begin with some definitions, and then we describe the difficulties inherent in reviewing “behavior genetics and adolescent development.” We conclude our introduction with a summary of the foundation on which we will base our review. In the next section, we carefully build that foundation. Following, we summarize the relevant research, and embed it within the organizational foundation.The starting point for most behavior genetic modeling is the conceptual partitioning of sources of variance into genetic, shared environmental, and nonshared environmental (e.g., Rowe & Plomin, 1981). Some of the similarity between individuals in the same family may be caused by sharing the same genes. For example, monozygotic (MZ) twins share 100 percent ... log in or subscribe to read full text