Recovering Latent Association from Likert-Type Responses: A Monte Carlo Comparison of Pearson, Spearman, Kendall, and Polychoric Correlations Under Discretization, Response Perturbation, and Gumbel-Copula Dependence
Likert-type responses are often analyzed as continuous scores, although their categories are ordered rather than truly metric. This study uses Monte Carlo simulation to examine how ordinal discretization, response perturbation, and non-Gaussian dependence affect four association estimators: Pearson correlation, Spearma...