Should I split my sample?

[Wyatt]

For my master thesis I have conducted a survey with Likert-scales. But now I'm sure which test to use to verify or falsify my hypotheses.

For example, I have a hypothesis that states that:

Citizens who have a negative perception towards European politics, think of lobbying of less democratically legitimate than citizens who have a neutral or positive attitude towards politics.

I measured, with Likert-scales, both these attitudes (the perception towards European politics and the perceived democratic legitimacy of lobbying) in a scale from one to five. Edit: I have 170 respondents for this survey.

My question is, can I just use linear regression analysis to find a correlation, or do I have to split the sample into the group that is negative (and thus score a 1 or 2) and neutral or positive (who score 2,3,4)? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

 

[staassis]

If both variables are ordinal or continuous, you should not split the sample. You should run Kendall's tau and / or Spearman's rho on the whole sample. This will pick up any linear or non-linear monotonic relationship between the two variables.