Which statistical test to use when data are sorted lists?

Question

I have a study where I asked participants to sort voices based on different traits (for example from least to most confident or from least to most attractive).

I want to do a rank correlation to see if:

1. There is a relationship within participants' responses between different traits (if a participant thinks a voice is more attractive, do they also prefer that voice more?)

2. There is a relationship within traits between participants' responses (if a participant thinks a voice is more masculine, does another participant agree?)

In my study, voices were identified using integers 0 through 5. Therefore, for each participant, I have a sorted list of digits 0 through 5 for each trait. How can I use this data with a rank correlation test like Spearman's Rho?

I think it is a mistake to simply pass the two ''ranked lists'' to a function like

scipy.stats.spearmanr([0,3,2,5,4,1], [2,0,3,1,5,4])

but I am not sure about this.

Answer 1

The answer is that I should convert each sorted list of voices to their corresponding indices.

voices = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
sorted_voices = [0, 3, 2, 5, 4, 1]
indices = [0, 5, 2, 1, 4, 3] #indices of voices in sorted_voices

I should be using the indices in the spearmanr function rather than the list of voices themselves. This would have been more obvious if I didn't numerically code them as 0 through 5.