Hello everyone,

I have been trying to solve this riddle but I am not getting any closer. I am in desperate need of help.

I want to examine the relationship between two continuous (scaled) variables.

I failed the assumption to use Pearson's as my variables do not show a linear relationship. Therefore I considered Spearman's rho. However! (as I am examining a relationship within a particular group) my sample size is small (n=9), which makes Spearman's useless and my variables do not show a monotonic relationship (however, this could be because my sample size is small..).

After some digging, discovered Kendalls-tau-b and read that it can be used to look at continuous variables and or/ ordinal variables. However, again, Kendalls-tau-b also looks to see whether there is a monotonic relationship (my scatterplot diagram shows non-monotonicity between the two variables) BUT it's a good association analysis to use with small sample sizes.

I honestly do not know what to do. Should I use a Kendalls-tau-b? I am completely at loss.