I am trying to see if there is a relationship between personality traits and level of support for vigilantism using survey data. All the survey responses are likert scale and I am not sure what test would be best.
An example question for the independent variable: Here are a number of personality traits that may or may not apply to you. Please let me know the extent to which you agree or disagree that these traits describe you. You should rate the extent to which the pair of traits applies to you, even if one characteristic applies more strongly than the
other. - Critical, quarrelsome (strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree)
An example question for the dependent variable: A group of villagers spots three men illegally harvesting rosewood in the bush. They gather their weapons to confront the men about the crime. During the confrontation tempers flare and the rosewood harvesters are killed. - Thanks to people like the villagers, at least something is done about crime. (strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree)
I am going to use R to conduct the analysis so any coding advice is appreciated!
Leedy, Paul D., and Jeanne Ellis Ormond. 2016. Practical Research: Planning and Design. 11th ed., Global. Boston, MA: Pearson.
page 163
"Although rating scales and rubrics might yield numbers, a researcher can't necessarily add the results of different scales together. For one thing, rating scales sometimes yield ordinal data rather than interval data, precluding even such simple mathemetical calulations as addition and subtraction."
page 110 under "Nominal Scales"
Appropriate statical analyses: mode, percentage, chi-square test
page 111 under "Ordinal Scales"
The following are in addition to statistics used for nominal data.
"We can also determine the median, or halfway point, in a set of data. We can use percentile rank to identify the relative position of any item or individual in a group. We can determine the extent of the realtionship between two characterics by means of Spearman's rank order correlation."