Ciao all,
I do not know if this is the most appropriate section for posting however I will give it my best shot. I am conducting a capstone project for my genetic epidemiology program but unfortunately my mentors are unaware of the methods used for the project I will describe here so they encouraged me to connect with individuals on this website. Some may argue I should do a project that I can receive some assistance with from my mentors but I am passionate about this project!
I have a sample of twins raised apart and twins raised together. It includes the outcome I examine which is a measure of depression (it is continuous but also can be categorized in 3 categories). The sample also includes measures on the guardians who raised the individuals (some are binary like whether there was smoking in the household and some are continuous like income in the household). The objective for this project are threefold- firstly, to estimate how heritable depression is and relate it to the literature (the sample has monozygotic and dizygotic twins raised apart and twins raised together). I believe this is viable through intraclass correlations but I do not know how to make efficient use of the sampling design. Next I want to test for relationships of each of the guardian measures and depression to see how they may have an impact. Thirdly I want to test for mediators like social support.
This is my first time conducting such a rich empirical study. It is perhaps ambitious but I have done much reading and now am needing assistance with how to implement these analyses into R. In my preliminary efforts and literature investigation I do believe I want to use a SEM or fixed effects framework in favour of the ACE approaches. Feedback is so appreciated.
Cheers,
Oscar