To find association between peer's support (independent variable) and work satisfaction (dependent variable) I wish to apply chi-square test. Peer's support is categories in four groups according to the extent of support: 1=very less extent, 2=to some extent, 3=to great extent and 4=to very great extent. Work satisfaction is categories into two: 0=not satisfied and 1=satisfied.
The SPSS output says than 37.5 percent cell frequencies are less than 5. My sample size is 101 and I don't want to reduce categories in independent variable into lesser number. In this situation is there any other test that can be applied to test this association?
Best Answer
Conover (1999:202) suggested that the expected values can be "as small as 0.5, as long as most are greater than 1.0, without endangering the validity of the test."
He also provides a "rule of thumb" from Cochran (1952) which suggested that if expected values are less than 1 or if more than 20% are less than 5, the test may perform poorly. However, Conover (1999) provides some evidence that Cochran's "rule of thumb" is overly conservative.
References
Cochran, W. G. 1952. The $\chi^2$ test of goodness of fit. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 23:315-345.
Conover, W. J. 1999. Practical nonparametric statistics. Third Edition. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, New York, USA.