Polychoric correlations. ALWAYS.
Spearman's correlation --->ranks----> what are you going to do about the multiple ties?
Use the value that SAS prints off

Seriously I do not know how SAS addresses ties. In the past there was not huge differences in polychoric and spearman results.
Here is a related question. I am running regression with these values. While some argue that a dv can be treated as interval if its likert scale I chose to treat it as ordinal (which of course it is). I chose logistic regression rather than ordered logistic regression (I collapse the 4 point scale in the DV into 2 points). I ran into problems with ordered regression last time and in honesty I know it less than two level logistic regression.
Last time I ran this I converted the four point predictor variables into bivariate predictors (I don't know why, it was six years ago). Formally it does not matter I believe how the predictors are coded, two or four levels. But are there significant advantages of using either two level or 4 level predictors? I know of none in the literature.
The purpose of this is to determine which variables have relatively greater impact on the DV (and yes I know many feel that is an invalid exercise in regression). Not the slope coefficients. I use two different measures to do this, the standardized coefficients SAS creates and which has the higher WALD score (and yes I know there is no agreement on that either).
