Hi

I'm not a stat expert so my question may be really naive.


Is it possible to conduct a correlation analysis for ONE person? The unit of analysis (case) however is not a person but an intance that occurs at a time.

Below is a mock up data for ONE person who has different values for variable A and variable B for each week. I want to test if variable A and Variable B are correlated across weeks for this (ONE) person?


CASES,      |    Variable A,           |    Variable B
week1,       |             2,             |         3              
week2,       |             3,             |        4
week3,       |            1,              |       5
week4,       |           5,               |      9
week5,       |          7,                |     10
week6,       |         4,                 |     4
week7,       |        8,                  |    12
.
.
.
.week24,      |           2,         |                5


It seems the assumption of independence is violated. Values in one week are related to values in other weeks as the data come from one person only. So, I'm thinking of using a non-parametric test such as (Spearman rank  instead of Pearson r).

However, I'm not sure even if I can do such an analysis as I have a non independent sample (of instances at week).

Any advise will be appreciated.