How do I know when to choose between Spearman’s ρ and Pearson’s r? My variable includes satisfaction and the scores were interpreted using the sum of the scores. However, these scores could also be ranked.
Shortest and mostly correct answer is:
Pearson benchmarks linear relationship, Spearman benchmarks monotonic relationship (few infinities more general case, but for some power tradeoff).
So if you assume/think that the relation is linear (or, as a special case, that those are a two measures of the same thing, so the relation is y=1⋅x+0) and the situation is not too weired (check other answers for details), go with Pearson. Otherwise use Spearman.
This happens often in statistics: there are a variety of methods which could be applied in your situation, and you don’t know which one to choose. You should base your decision the pros and cons of the methods under consideration and the specifics of your problem, but even then the decision is usually subjective with no agreed-upon “correct” answer. Usually it is a good idea to try out as many methods as seem reasonable and that your patience will allow and see which ones give you the best results in the end.
The difference between the Pearson correlation and the Spearman correlation is that the Pearson is most appropriate for measurements taken from an interval scale, while the Spearman is more appropriate for measurements taken from ordinal scales. Examples of interval scales include “temperature in Farenheit” and “length in inches”, in which the individual units (1 deg F, 1 in) are meaningful. Things like “satisfaction scores” tend to of the ordinal type since while it is clear that “5 happiness” is happier than “3 happiness”, it is not clear whether you could give a meaningful interpretation of “1 unit of happiness”. But when you add up many measurements of the ordinal type, which is what you have in your case, you end up with a measurement which is really neither ordinal nor interval, and is difficult to interpret.
I would recommend that you convert your satisfaction scores to quantile scores and then work with the sums of those, as this will give you data which is a little more amenable to interpretation. But even in this case it is not clear whether Pearson or Spearman would be more appropriate.