Solved – How to correctly assess the correlation between ordinal and a continuous variable

continuous datacorrelationordinal-dataspearman-rho

I'd like to estimate the correlation between:

An ordinal variable: subjects are asked to rate their preference for 6 types of fruit on a 1-5 scale (ranging from very disgusting to very tasty) On average subjects use only 3 points of the scale.

A continuous variable: the same subjects are asked to quickly identify these fruits, which results in an mean accuracy for the 6 fruits.

Is Spearman rho the best method to analyze these data and/or are there other good methods I could consider?

Best Answer

You could use Spearman's, which is based on ranks and therefore OK for ordinal data. You would then have six results.

If you want to take a different approach, you could get complex and look at a multilevel model, with subject being repeated. It sounds like "accuracy" would depend on "preference". So, a mixed model could look at that and account for the non-independence of the data. But, as noted, that's a much more complex model to implement.

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