PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Emil O. W. Kirkegaard
AU  - Mingrui Wang
AU  - John Fuerst
TI  - Biogeographic Ancestry and Socioeconomic Outcomes in the Americas: A Meta-Analysis
AID  - 10.1101/055681
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 055681
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/03/01/055681.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/03/01/055681.full
AB  - Narrative reports suggest that socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with biogeographic ancestry (BGA) in the Americas. If so, SES potentially acts as a confound that needs to be taken into account when evaluating the relation between medical outcomes and BGA. To explore how systematic BGA-SES associations are, a meta-analysis of American studies was conducted. 40 studies were identified, yielding a total of 64 independent samples with directions of associations, including 48 independent samples with effect sizes. An analysis of association directions found a high degree of consistency. The square rootn-weighted directions were 0.83 (K = 36), −0.81 (K = 41) and −0.82 (K = 39) for European, Amerindian and African BGA, respectively. An analysis of effect size magnitudes found that European BGA was positively associated with SES, with a meta-analytic effect size of r = .18 [95% Cl: .13 to .24, K = 28, n = 35,476.5], while both Amerindian and African BGA were negatively associated with SES, having meta-analytic effect sizes of −.14 [−.18 to −.10, K = 31, n = 28,937.5] and −.11 [−.15 to −.07, K = 28, n = 32,710.5], respectively. There was considerable cross-sample variation in effect sizes (mean I2 = 92%), but the sample size was not enough for performing credible moderator analysis. Implications for future studies are discussed.