Can Psychometric Measurement Models Inform Behavior Genetic Models? A Bayesian Model Comparison Approach

As methodologists have increasingly noted, the role of psychometrics in operationalizing a construct is often overlooked when evaluating research claims (Borsboom, 2006). In a related vein, others have noted that psychological research appears to move away from assessment and interpretation of a single a priori statistical model to a more nuanced comparison of models which assess the trade-off between a model’s parsimony and complexity in explaining behavior (e.g., Rodgers, 2010). The genetic factor model is one such statistical model often used to estimate the relative contributions of genetic and environmental components of observed behavior in genetically informative designs (Heath, Neale, Hewitt, Eaves, & Fulker, 1989; Martin, Eaves et al., 1977; Neale & Cardon, 1992). Mathematically, the genetic factor model decomposes observed phenotypic variability into additive genetic (A), common (C), and unique (E) environmental components and is, for that reason, often referred to as the ACE model.