Question about Spearman's correlation I want to measure the associations between a number of variables and all of them are measured on a ratio scale. If I am to run Spearman's correlation, can I just run it on the variables as is? Or do I have to rank them first?
So to give a simplistic example, if variable 1 is IQ score (subject 1 has a 100, subject 2 has a 150, and subject 3 has a 125) and variable 2 is GPA (subject 1 has a 3.1, subject 2 has a 2.9, and subject 3 has a 2.2). Can I just click the button to calculate Spearman’s rho based on these numbers… Or for each of the variables do I first need to assign ranks to each of the scores and then click the button to calculate Spearman’s rho on the ranks?
I've read online and it's not totally clear. In the link posted below gives an example using variables that are measured on a ratio scale (as mine is) and he/she seems to just be hitting the button to run the correlation without doing any sort of transformation to rank the data first (this person also happens to be using SPSS as I am).
https://statistics.laerd.com/spss-tutorials/spearmans-rank-order-correlation-using-spss-statistics.php
Based on this my guess is that since both of my variables are on a ratio scale, I can simply just run Spearman's on the variables as is without transforming them in any way. But I'm not sure. Any help with answering this question would be appreciated.

Any program that purports to run the Spearman test will (presumably) do the ranking itself as a first step. The way to be sure with your program, is to run an example from a text.
