Statistical Test when cross table has less than 5 cases for majority of the cells

[Shivi82]

Dear Team, 

i am working on a survey data and need to run a chi square test to see if there is any relation between gender and rating. 

As one of the assumption of Chi Square is : Sample Size: each particular scenario (cell) must have at least five cases. However as i have very less data points hence this assumption is violated. 

We can run a fisher exact test in this scenario though while researching i came across a literature from "Wai Wan Tsang and Kai Ho Cheng" from the Univeristy of The University of Hong Kong" that we can still run a chi square test. 

I am a bit confused and while searching this on researchgate. net this option was suggested hence checking on the forum if this is still a valid test to conduct. 

Regards, Shivi

[PGStats]

You can request exact statistics for the likelihood ratio chi-square test (if that what your reference is about) with EXACT LRCHI;

[Rick_SAS · Accepted solution]

Yes, it sounds like exact tests would be appropriate. For an overview of exact tests in PROC FREQ, see "Exact tests in PROC FREQ: What, when, and how."

If you have many dozens of cells, a full exact test might be prohibitively expensive. In that case, you can use Monte Carlo approximations to the exact test by adding the MC option to the EXACT statement:

exact pchi / MC;     /* Monte Carlo approximation to exact chi-square test */

[Shivi82]

Thanks Rick for the solution. I think this works perfect. Also thanks for sharing the blog link.