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Testing Environmental Effects on Age at Menarche and Sexual Debut within a Genetically Informative Twin Design

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A Correction to this article was published on 27 June 2023

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Abstract

Life-history-derived models of female sexual development propose menarche timing as a key regulatory mechanism driving subsequent sexual behavior. The current research utilized a twin subsample of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health; n = 514) to evaluate environmental effects on timings of menarche and sexual debut, as well as address potential confounding of these effects within a genetically informative design. Results show mixed support for each life history model and provide little evidence rearing environment is important in the etiology of individual differences in age at menarche. This research calls into question the underlying assumptions of life-history-derived models of sexual development and highlights the need for more behavior genetic research in this area.

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Notes

  1. This research uses data from Add Health, funded by grant P01 HD31921 (Harris) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Add Health is currently directed by Robert A. Hummer and funded by the National Institute on Aging cooperative agreements U01 AG071448 (Hummer) and U01AG071450 (Aiello and Hummer) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Add Health was designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

  2. Although oversampled, prior research has shown that the twin subsample of the Add Health does not differ substantially from the nonsibling sample on a variety of measures (e.g., Barnes & Boutwell, 2013; Jacobson & Rowe, 1998; Nedelec et al., 2017).

  3. Our preregistered sample size included 254 twin pairs. We ultimately elected to include data from three additional twins with no co-twin data, bringing the number of pairs to 257.

  4. These were, “how often in the last month have you (parent) had five or more drinks on one occasion” (PA62), “how many other states or countries have you lived since June 1995” (H3HR20), “since the beginning of June 1995 at how many (other) addresses have you lived” (H3HR18).

  5. Specifically, 60.5% were raised by biological fathers, 14.5% were raised by unrelated father figures, and less than 6.0% were raised by any type of non-biological but related father figure (i.e., grandfather, brother, uncle, or other male relative).

  6. Missing values were saved for participants who were missing data on the indicators analyzed with PCA. Missing data were handled via pairwise present in the SEM analyses.

  7. Age of menarche at Wave 2 [H2FP4] was employed to reduce missingness; additionally, respondents who reached age of menarche prior to father absence were coded as “0” on this item.

  8. We planned to use robust maximum likelihood (MLR) as the estimator, but we had a mix of continuous and categorical indicators and needed to specify residual covariances between the latter. This can only be accomplished via mixture modeling in the context of MLR and we found this approach much more computationally intensive than WLSMV. We preregistered the decision to use WLSMV if MLR was too computationally intensive.

  9. The Wald z-tests and global χ2 test are only asymptotically equivalent, meaning that they will only match closely in large samples. Wald tests are regarded as a poor choice to testing hypotheses in samples of modest size, where second-order parameters converge slowly to normality. Additionally, the Wald z-test is sensitive to the choice of parameterization, whereas the global χ2 test is invariant to change-of-parameter.

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  1. School of Human Services, University of Cincinnati, PO Box 210002, Cincinnati, OH, 45221, USA

    George B. Richardson

  2. Department of Psychology, Oakland University, 654 Pioneer Drive, Rochester, MI, 48309, USA

    Nicole Barbaro

  3. School of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati, PO Box 210389, Cincinnati, OH, 45221, USA

    Joseph L. Nedelec & Hexuan Liu

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Richardson, G.B., Barbaro, N., Nedelec, J.L. et al. Testing Environmental Effects on Age at Menarche and Sexual Debut within a Genetically Informative Twin Design. Hum Nat 34, 324–356 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-023-09451-5

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