Am I using the Right Approach?
I am hoping someone can give me some guidance! I struggle a lot with statistics. The idea of stats sounds fun because you have to look at your data and decide which approach statistically is best and gives your data the most love, but that's what also makes it so stressful! I would love to get some insight.
I am trying to look at the relationship between bacterial loads of a blood-borne pathogen of hosts and their parasites (there is only one order of parasite but multiple species, and there are multiple species of hosts). However, some hosts have 1 parasite while others have four or more (with varying bacterial statuses from zero to way higher). I have 144 hosts and 270 parasites.
I originally wanted to do a T-test or ANOVA, but I don't believe bacterial loads are independent data, since the presence or absence of the pathogen can be dependent on vector competence and other factors.
I am thinking now that I need to do a nonparametric test of some sort, since I do not have normally distributed and dependent data.
I have been interested in looking at host sex and age to see if those could also be factors in this relationship, but I am concerned that it would shrink my already small dataset. I was really excited about doing species-related relationship stats, but my parasite/host dataset is too small, and I had some difficulties getting pathogen species results.
Can someone give me recommendations on good statistics resources, specifically anything for disease ecology? Thank you!