spearmans r

a measure of the correlation between two variables.

Spearman's r is not usually the default correlation in many areas of research. Instead, the most commonly used measure is Pearson's r. This is partly because Pearson's integrates into other techniques such as multiple regression. However, Spearman's correlation has the advantage that it can be used for ordinal data, while Pearson's correlation can only be used for interval data. This makes Spearman's r indispensable in many situations. Some researchers report both correlation scores for completeness. Typically, the two correlation measures, Spearman's and Pearson's, closely resemble each other and produce highly similar results.