Estimating cross-population LD decay and its effect on trans-ethnic polygenic scores

Differing patterns of linkage disequilibrium (LD) across populations (LD decay) potentially reduce the trans-ethnic validity of GWAS results. In this study, I compute a measure of LD decay to test the hypothesis that it mediates the difference in polygenic scores computed using GWAS summary statistics between Europeans and Africans.There was a significant PGS difference between CEU and YRI ( 50.312% - 47.995%, p= 0.001). In total, there were 1,680,781 SNPs in LD with 2,596 GWAS SNP within a 500 Kb window.There was no correlation between a measure of LD decay and population differences in polygenic scores of educational attainment.This study provides no evidence that LD decay affects the trans-ethnic predictive validity of polygenic scores.

Measuring Adolescent Social and Academic Self-Efficacy

Objective: This study examines the psychometric strength, including cross-ethnic validity, of two subscales of Muris’ Self-Efficacy Questionnaire for Children: Academic Self-Efficacy (ASE) and Social Self-Efficacy (SSE). Methods: A large ethnically diverse sample of 3,358 early and late adolescents completed surveys including the ASE and SSE. Analyses focused on the subscales’ psychometric properties for the aggregate sample as well as for specific racial/ethnic subgroups. Results: For the ASE, Cronbach’s α for the aggregate sample is .85, ranging from .84 to .86 across racial/ethnic subgroups. For the SSE, the aggregate Cronbach’s α is .81, ranging from .77 to .86 across these subgroups. Conclusions: While aggregate findings indicate psychometric strength, analyses of cross-ethnic validity find some factor structure and item loading differences across racial/ethnic subgroups, indicating the need to ensure accurate measurement of self-efficacy across diverse youth samples.