What hypothesis testing to use for continuous to categorical variables? For example, I'd like to know if a person's age (a continuous variable) is related to whether the person drinks (a categorical/binary variable of Y or N). What method should I use to know

*

*If there's a significant relationship.

*The strength of the association.

*The direction of the association - whether younger people tend to drink, or the opposite.


Because the categorical variable has two categories, one could also just use correlation:  Pearson, Spearman, or Kendall.  This might be the most appropriate approach for "association" where the dependent and independent variables aren't specified.  The direction should be clear, and these methods report a measure of the strength of the association that people are fairly familiar with:  r, rho, or tau.
