Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Study Of Relationships Between Family Members Using Familial Correlations, Corinne Wilson

Mathematics & Statistics Theses & Dissertations

Familial correlations measure the resemblance between family members and are used in many fields of study including epidemiology, genetics, heredity, and psychology. Here, an analysis of familial correlations where male and female children of the same family can have different correlations in the unequal family size case is presented. First, three likelihood based tests, namely the likelihood ratio test, Rao score test, and Wald test, and two more asymptotic tests which use Srivastava's estimator of the intraclass correlation coefficient are considered to test the null hypothesis of equality of the intraclass correlation coefficients when families have unequal numbers of children. …