New perspectives for the MDC index in social research fields

he great interest in quantitative social research has led to the development of specific statistical techniques suitable in dealing with dependence between variables also in the presence of ordinal data. A specific index, hereafter called monotonic dependence coefficient (MDC), was provided as a monotonic dependence measure. Due to its properties and specific features, MDC overcomes the Pearson's correlation coefficient, since it captures not only linear dependence relationships but also any general monotonic one. The MDC adequacy is validated by a simulation study assessing its performance with respect to the traditional Pearson's correlation coefficient. Finally, a real application of MDC to real data is also illustrated.