What's the best way to study whether alcohol consumption affects happiness & cognitive function?

[lactucae]

Hello,
I want to study if there's a relationship between alcohol consumption and happiness + cognitive function.

Most of my data is nominal or ordinal.

To measure alcohol consumption:

• How often respondent has had an alcoholic drink during the last 12 months

To measure happiness:

• Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?
• Whether was happy much of the time during past week
• Psychiatric Problems has: depression

To measure cognitive function:

• Computed score from maths questions
• Computed score from literacy questions

Since I mostly have nominal data (except for the first question to measure happiness, which provides ordinal data), should I stick to Chi square tests and run one for each happiness & cognitive function variable?

I don't think I can go for regression/one-way ANOVA since none of my variables is continuous.

What's the best way to go about it? Thanks in advance!

 

[Karabiner]

I am a bit suprised that cognitive function isn't interval scaled here? Could you please describe exately how
your data were measured, e.g. which answering formats were there etc.?

With kind regards

Karabiner

 

[lactucae]

I am a bit suprised that cognitive function isn't interval scaled here? Could you please describe exately how
your data were measured, e.g. which answering formats were there etc.?

With kind regards

Karabiner

Sure! I am practicing with the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, and they measured cognitive function by asking a number of maths and literacy questions. The responses included a couple of wrong answers, one correct answer, and the usual "I don't know", "No response" etc.

The computed score includes "correct answe given" "any other answer given", other than the usual ones mentioned above.

 

[Karabiner]

Cognitive skills are interval scaled, I suppose, if "number of correct answers" is measured.
Please describe how all other variables were measured (response format, in particular)?

With kind regards

Karabiner