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The Determination of Twin Zygosity by Means of a Mailed Questionnaire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Svenn Torgersen
Svenn Torgersen*
Affiliation:
The Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities, Center for Research in Clinical Psychology, University of Oslo
*
Center for Research in Clinical Psychology, PO Box 1039, Blindern, Oslo 3, Norway

Abstract

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A mailed questionnaire dealing with similarity in childhood, and how often and by whom the twins were mixed up, was applied to 290 same-sex adult twin pairs. For about 75% of pairs ten genetic markers were analysed. The agreement in zygosity classification between questionnaire and blood typing was high. Irrespective of whether raw scores or discriminant function analysis was applied, the agreement was nearly 95%. When a decision tree was applied, the percentage rose to nearly 96%. Considering that probably four of the twin pairs were wrongly classified as MZ by genetic markers, the percentage rose to 96 and 98, respectively.

Keywords

Twin zygosityDeterminationQuestionnaire studiesNorwegian population
Type
Research Article
Information
Acta geneticae medicae et gemellologiae: twin research , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , July 1979 , pp. 225 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Twin Studies 1979

References

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