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I have two ordinal variables which are set on different scales. The variables were extracted from a questionnaire. The first variable ranges from -12 to +12 with a step of 1 width, ( -12, -11,...-2,-1 , 0, 1, 2,..., +11, +12) and the second one ranges only from -2 to +2 with the same step width(-2,-1,0,+1,+2). I would like to investigate whether they correlate and also measure the strength of a potential association between them. How do I do this? Do I have to standardise the variables in order to compare them to each other? Thank you in advance, Konstantinos

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    $\begingroup$ Paying attention to how wide is the step width exposes that one actually thinks his scales are interval, not ordinal. Ordinal scales do not have a defined step width, albeit they do differ in respect to the number of levels (=categories, =points): some are more grained and some are less. $\endgroup$
    – ttnphns
    Commented Jan 4, 2013 at 9:50
  • $\begingroup$ hi, thank you for your comment. Still, how would these variables be compared to each other? $\endgroup$
    – Konstantinos
    Commented Jan 4, 2013 at 10:14

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Polychoric correlations were developed for precisely this problem. There are implementations in R.

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