I don't know if it is just me, but I am struggling to parse the meaning of the part regarding the effect of "ever being in a relationship by their late twenties" on the premise of this study. The only way I see it now is it means "being in a relationship by their late twenties negates the whole phenomena of childlessness and intelligence score relationship that was observed in the study", but that doesn't feel right.
If someone in the thread can offer a more readable/simplified version of that statement, it would be very appreciated.
It sounds like the conclusion here is that not ever being in a relationship by your late twenties AND having a high intelligence predicts childlessness. For that to be interesting/worth mentioning, I would assume not being in a relationship by your late twenties and having mid level intelligence does NOT predict childlessness, or at least not as strongly.
I’m guilty of jumping straight to the comments after not reading the article, however, so there might be more details either supporting/refuting that conclusion that I’m missing, I’m just going off of your quote.
From the paper:
"The results of the present study did not support my hypothesis that intelligence should be negatively associated with childlessness."
In fairness, the somewhat confusing verbiage here is from I assume a Norwegian non-native English speaker.
> Results: No linear association between intelligence and childlessness was found. However, follow-up analyses showed that higher risk of childlessness was associated with the highest stanine intelligence score (two standard deviations above the normed average), and that this effect was mediated by whether participants had ever been in a relationship by their late twenties. No significant direct effect of the highest stanine intelligence score was found when the question of whether participants had ever been in a relationship by their late twenties was included.