I have NO clue what i'm doing. What statistical test could work for my data?

The first thing to think about is the types of variables you are looking at:

  • The music genre variable is a nominal (aka categorical) variable - you can't even order the different values it has.
  • Your number of times variable could be treated in two main ways. The more correct approach would be 'ordinal', you have categorical information, and the categories have an innate order to them. The alternative would be to treat the variable as 'interval'/continuous by taking the midpoint of each option.

There is then the question of which variable is the dependent variable, and which is the independent variable. In this case you have observational data, but the length of time listening seems the better dependent (or outcome) variable and the genre variable is probably the independent variable. I would argue this for two reasons: 1) the length of time you spend per day listening to music is unlikely to influence your favourite genre, the influence seems more likely to travel the other way. 2) having a categorical dependent variable is harder to work with. It won't affect your conclusions which is which in a two variable analysis, so go with the easy option.

So if you look up on this link, with one ordinal dependent variable and a categorical independent variable with more than 2 levels (independent groups) - you want to use the Kruskal Wallis test.

This gives you a p-value testing the hypothesis that the average rank of your 'how often' variable is equal between the different favourite genre groups.

You may want to follow this up with post-hoc tests comparing pairs of genres to see which genres are significantly different from each other. Remember to adjust for multiple comparisons here. Some software can do this for you automatically, otherwise just run a KW test on the two genres of interest and exclude the rest.

One thing, the KW test is only valid where your group size is at least 5. You will either have to ignore (leave out) genres with less than 5 endorsers, or collapse genre categories to meet this criterion. You might do this on the basis of theory (e.g. merge together small category A with large category B because these musical genres are similar), or you might do it on the basis of expediency (e.g. merge together small categories A, B and C to form an 'other' genre group). Decide on and justify any category collapsing before you run any analysis or the statistics gods will strike you down.

/r/AskStatistics Thread