What is a spearmans rank correlation and what does it show?

Question

i need the answer soon please!...

Answer 1

Spearmans rank correlation is a measure of the relatedness of two variables (just like correlation), but without taking into account the shape of the distribution of each variable.

It is equivalent to taking each of your two variables, ranking them from smallest to largest, and then finding the correlation between the ranks.  A high p (close to 1 or -1) means that the rank of an observation of variable 1 is highly predictive of a the rank of an observation of variable 2.

See the wiki entry for a good example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearman's_...