Calculating Confidence Intervals for Genetic Heritability

THIS paper presents detailed procedures (and an example) for calculating confidence limits for genetic heritability for two situations which are quite common in poultry breeding. GENETIC HERITABILITY COMPUTED FROM DATA FROM A SINGLE HATCH Suppose that r sires are each mated to s dams and t offsprings result from each sire-dam mating. If σS2 is the variance between sires, σD2 the variance between dams, and σ2 the variance between offsprings, then there are three common measures of heritability (Lerner, 1950) In a paper by Osborne and Paterson (1952) an approximate method for setting confidence limits on h12, h22, and h32 is given. However, this paper is mathematical in nature and detailed computing instructions are not given. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to simplify some of the results and apply them to a particular example using poultry breeding data. We will assume that the reader is familiar with the …