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I am trying to figure out if there exists a relation between the region someone lives in and their ranking of a website. The region variable is categorical, dependent, and spans 11 levels such as the Mountainous regions, Pacific Northwest, etc.

My ordinal independent variable is numbered from 1-9, with 9 being completely satisfied with the website, and 1 being completely dissatisfied.

The problem I am having here is that I am not sure which test to use with the ordinal independent variable. I would normally use the ANOVA but from my understanding I don't have an interval dependent variable here. Does anyone have any thoughts?

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    $\begingroup$ Why insist on that your independent variable is ordinal? Likert-type rating scales are often treated as interval, especially when being predictors. "Ordinal" predictors are always a problem, no satisfactory recipe exists. $\endgroup$
    – ttnphns
    Commented Aug 21, 2015 at 22:23
  • $\begingroup$ You may replace the original variable by its ranks. This is one way to "cope" with ordinality - "since distribution on ordinal scale - if to see it as quatitative - is never known, replace it by uniform one". $\endgroup$
    – ttnphns
    Commented Aug 22, 2015 at 9:48

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My ordinal independent variable is numbered from 1-9, with 9 being completely satisfied with the website, and 1 being completely dissatisfied.

From your description this sounds more like your dependent, that is, response variable. Since this is ordinal, you can use a rank-based alternative to anova, that is the Kruskal-Wallis test. If you should happen to have more predictors (independent variables, covariables, ...) then ordinal regression is an extension, see

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