Abstract
Social welfare support runs in families. Recent studies using Nordic registry data have found individualdifferences in genetic factors to be of substantial importance for medical benefits. However, to date there hasbeen no genetically informative studies on receiving social welfare support. To prevent young adults to notdrop out of the work life and become recipients of social welfare support, it is of substantial interest toclarify to what extent the familiarity of social welfare support is due to genetic or social differences betweenfamilies. We used data from the Historical-Event Database on 7,698 Norwegian twins born 1967-1979 toestimate the relative contribution of genetic factors, the effective familial environment (i.e. the “sharedenvironment”), and individual-specific environmental factors. We found that the two forms of familial risk,genetic and shared environmental, explained 39% and 45%, respectively, of the risk for receiving socialwelfare support among young Norwegian twins. Only 17% of the variance in risk factors could be explainedby individual-specific risk factors. It appears that risk for receiving social welfare support can to a greatextent be explained by environmental differences between families. Therefore prevention strategies targetingsocial inequalities between families would indeed be effective. Furthermore, genetic risk factors are alsoimportant in explaining risk for receiving social welfare support. These effects could be mediated throughheritable traits related to substance abuse, psychiatric disorders, and personality. Individual-specific risk factorswere of very little importance. Hence, with regard to receiving social welfare support, family matters.
Highlights
It is commonplace to think of Norway as an egalitarian society where everyone has equal rights and equal access to the various welfare schemes
Social welfare support is a temporary welfare scheme, where the intention is that recipients should be able to provide for themselves as soon as possible
The payouts of social welfare support are less than other welfare schemes, and are intentionally kept at a subsistence minimum
Summary
It is commonplace to think of Norway as an egalitarian society where everyone has equal rights and equal access to the various welfare schemes. It is possible to approach the etiology of risk factors, by dividing the variance into three sources: additive genetic effects, individualspecific environment, and the environment that family members share, but which varies between families The latter include, by definition, only environmental factors that make twins in a pair similar, whether be it intrauterine factors, upbringing or influence from peers or teachers. Other medical welfare schemes, such as long-term sick leave and disability pensioning, has been found to be affected by genetic factors, but not by shared environment, at least not at levels high enough to be statistically significant [5,6,7,8,9]. We investigate to what degree receiving social welfare support is associated with genetic and shared environmental factors
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