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Spearman's Rho Explained

Spearman's rho is a nonparametric measure of the strength and direction of association between two variables measured on at least an ordinal scale. It assesses how well the relationship between two variables can be described using a monotonic function. Spearman's rho can be used with either continuous variables that meet the assumptions for a monotonic relationship or ordinal variables. Examples of appropriate uses include the relationship between student achievement scores in math and music or the number of movie releases and gross receipts for a film studio.

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Jerome Policarpio
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345 views8 pages

Spearman's Rho Explained

Spearman's rho is a nonparametric measure of the strength and direction of association between two variables measured on at least an ordinal scale. It assesses how well the relationship between two variables can be described using a monotonic function. Spearman's rho can be used with either continuous variables that meet the assumptions for a monotonic relationship or ordinal variables. Examples of appropriate uses include the relationship between student achievement scores in math and music or the number of movie releases and gross receipts for a film studio.

Uploaded by

Jerome Policarpio
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

spearman's

rho
(Non Parametric for Ordinal Variable
What is
Spearman’s
Rho?

Spearman’s Rho is used to understand the strength of the


relationship between two variables. Your variables of interest can be
continuous or ordinal and should have a monotonic relationship

2023
The Spearman rank-order correlation
coefficient is a nonparametric measure of
the strength and direction of association
that exists between two variables
measured on at least an ordinal scale. It is
denoted by the symbol r ors ρ. The test is
used for either ordinal variables or for
continuous data that has failed the
assumptions necessary for conducting
the Pearson's product-moment
correlations Spearman’s Rho is also called Spearman’s
correlation, Spearman’s rank correlation
coefficient, Spearman’s rank-order
correlation, and Spearman rho metric.
examples:
Achievement scores of students in math and music

The Number of movie releases that a motion picture studio put out and its gross receipts for
the year

The number of hospitals and pharmacies in each of ten randomly selected provinces
Your two variables should be measured on an ordinal, interval or ratio scale.
There is a monotonic relationship between the two variables. A monotonic relationship
exists when either the variables increase in value together, or as one variable value
increases, the other variable value decreases. Whilst there are a number of ways to
check whether a monotonic relationship exists between your two variables, we suggest
creating a scatterplot using SPSS Statistics, where you can plot one variable against the
other, and then visually inspect the scatterplot to check for monotonicity. Your
scatterplot may look something like one of the following:
Positive Monotonic: tends Negative Monotonic: Tends
Non-Monotonic: No
to increase but not to decrease but not
overall tendency to either
necessarily in a linear necessarily in a linear
increase or decrease
fashion. fashion.
Determining when to use
Spearman’s Correlation

Spearman’s correlation is appropriate for more types of relationships, but it


requires that your data must satisfy to be a valid. Specifically, Spearman’s
correlation requires your data to be continuous data that follow a monotonic
relationship or ordinal data.
When you have continuous data that do not follow a line, you must determine
whether they exhibit a monotonic relationship. In a monotonic relationship, as one
variable increases, the other variable tends to either increase or decrease, but not
necessarily in a straight line. This aspect of Spearman’s correlation allows you to fit
curvilinear relationships. However, there must be a tendency to change in a
particular direction, as illustrated in the graphs

The end

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