Spearman's rank correlation significance

Question

I'm calculating Spearman's rank correlation in matlab with the following code:

[RHO,PVAL] = corr(x,y,'Type','Spearman');

RHO =

    0.7211


PVAL =

   4.9473e-04

and then with different variables

[RHO,PVAL] = corr(x2,y2,'Type','Spearman');

RHO =

    0.3277


PVAL =

    0.0060

How do you categorize these as p < 0.05, p < 0.01, p < 0.001 etc. Commonly in scientific journals these pvalues are represented as the examples I've shown and not as one number. Would both of these be p < 0.01? When defining whether a correlation is significant to a specific value do you always look for the smallest error i.e if its PVAL = 0.0005, both p > 0.05 and p > 0.001 would be correct here, do we simply write the lowest i.e. p > 0.001?

Answer 1

As Martin Dinov wrote, this is at least partially a matter of journal policy. But, as long as there is no explicit journal convention against it, I would recommend to always report the actual p-value, in this case in the form p = 4.9·10^-4 and p = 0.006, respectively. You can then proceed to say that the effect you found is statistically significant, usually based on comparison with a previously chosen significance level, typically 0.05, unless you need to correct for multiple comparisons.

The reason is that the commonly used significance levels are purely a matter of convention. By only saying that p is below one conventional threshold means to withhold valuable information from the reader, which she might use to make up her own mind about the result – and this truncation is not even justified by relevant saving of print space.

You should also, of course, report the value of the correlation coefficient itself (which in this case doubles as a test statistic and an effect size) as well as the sample size.

At least for the field of psychology, these are official recommendations:

Hypothesis tests. It is hard to imagine a situation in which a dichotomous accept-reject decision is better than reporting an actual p value or, better still, a confidence interval.
…
Effect sizes. Always present effect sizes for primary outcomes. If the units of measurement are meaningful on a practical level (e.g., number of cigarettes smoked per day), then we usually prefer an unstandardized measure (regression coefficient or mean difference) to a standardized measure (r or d).

L. Wilkinson and the Task Force on Statistical Inference, "Statistical Methods in Psychology Journals. Guidelines and Explanations"

Answer 2

You mean pval is < 0.05 and also < 0.001 and not >. In general, you do want to show that it is smaller than the smallest significance level (alpha) threshold that you can. So yes, it is best to say for the second example that the p-value is < 0.001. Depending on the journal convention, it may be preferable to put the actual p-value in (so, for the first example, 4.9473e-04) or just that it's < some good alpha (0.0001 for the first case).