Constructing Confidence Intervals for Spearman’s Rank Correlation with Ordinal Data: A Simulation Study Comparing Analytic and Bootstrap Methods

Spearman’s (1904) rank correlation (rS) is a nonparametric statistic that allows an investigator to describe the strength of an association between two variables X and Y without making the more restrictive assumptions of the Pearson product-moment correlation (r). To calculate rS, one converts each variable to ranks, assigning equal ranks to any tied scores (but see Gonzales & Nelson, 1996, for alternative approaches to handling ties), and then uses the usual formula for r or this computational shortcut

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