Measures of associations for ordinal categorical data : different measures and similar conclusions

Abstract EN

In this study we go over different measures of association that can be used in analysing ordered categorical data.

These measures include: Kendall's tau, Goodman & Kruskal's Gamma, Somers' D, and Spearman rank correlation coefficient the study is focused on reviewing these measures and showing the similarities and differences between them in magnitude, significance and interpretations for the results given by them.

The data of the study are collected from a random sample of students at the University College of Makkah and the concern is to investigate any association between the academic performance level of students and the educational level of their guardians.

Despite the diversity of these measures in concepts and formulas, the study showed that these measures are not poling apart in magnitude, significance, and conclusions.

As far as the statistical packages are concerned, the study used SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). Key Words: Categorical data, Cross-classified tables, Measures of associations.