Overall, however, these technologies are in early stages of general application to human diseases, with a number of technical and analytic issues still needing to be worked out. As such, the kinds of variation contributing to individual differences in variables of interest to the social scientist remain poorly understood and sequencing designs are generally not appropriate currently for most such studies, unless there is substantial evidence of the kind detailed above supporting strong genetic effects or strong target regions. But this next generation of genetic techniques are changing the way we think about the many types of genetic variation that can affect behavior, so we include mention of them here to make the social scientist aware where the field of genetics is currently headed.
