# How do I find correlation measure between two nominal variables?

A survey was made where people chose what they use a certain smiley to represent and entered their country of origin. I have recoded the text responses to numeric.

What form of analysis should be used (preferably in SPSS) to check the level of correlation between where the people come from and the representations they chose?

There are a bunch of measures of nominal-nominal association.

There's the phi coefficient, the contingency coefficient (which I think applies to square tables, so perhaps not suitable for you), Cramer's V coefficient, the lambda coefficient, and the uncertainty coefficient. There are no doubt still more.

Many of them turn out to be a function of the chi-square statistic.

(If you have one or more ordinal variables, there are many other coefficients that are suitable for that situation.)

• I think that criticism applies to most such measures. It's rectangular ($m\times n$) nominal-nominal association. How much intuition is there going to be? – Glen_b -Reinstate Monica Mar 11 '13 at 1:13