Question

Describe the Minnesota Study of Twins Raised Apart project. What was the goal of this study? What were the challenges the researchers faced in conducting a study of this size?

Answer 1

GOAL OF STUDY

The Minnesota Twin Registry started in 1983 on the premise that all human research is more interesting and informative if twins participate. Its original goal was to establish a registry of all twins born in Minnesota from 1936 to 1955 to be used for psychological research. Recently, it has added twins born between 1961 and 1964. It primarily conducts personality and interests tests with its 8,000+ twin pairs and family members via mail. From this project, we were able to confirm that twins and their families are representative of the population and that a poll of their opinions would be more accurate than polls in the newspaper.

CHALLENGES

All twins born in MN at that time were invited to participate using birth registry data. 500 additional 11-year-old twin-pairs were added in 2000. Twin studies are valuable to researchers because identical twins share 100% of their genes and fraternal twins share, on average, 50% of their genes. Both identical and fraternal twins share certain aspects of their environment (e.g. religious practices in the home). This allows researchers to estimate the heritability of certain traits. Participants are asked about academic ability, personality, and interests; family and social relationships; mental and physical health; physiological measurements. Of interest to researchers are prevalence of psychopathology, substance abuse, divorce, leadership, and other traits and behaviors related to mental and physical health, relationships, and religiosity.​