Hello, for the following scenario, I am trying to determine a few things:

1) Does this require a Spearman or a Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test?

2) Is the data collected continuous or ordinal? It states that the participants were ranked, so the statisticians are analyzing this data they received. So, they are not doing the actual experiment, but rather analyzing the data to assess the efficacy of the dieting program.

3) As such, are they investigating an association/relationship between at least 2 variables or are they instead investigating differences between conditions using the same variable.

4) I am thinking that the variable is the rank, an independent variable, but is the weight loss considered a dependent variable since they're not measuring the actual weight, but analyzing ranked data.

5) Also, how do I determine independence/dependence of observations between conditions for this scenario?

Honestly the more I read between Spearman vs Wilcoxon, the more confused I get...flip flopping between them both. Hoping someone can help me out here.

Scenario:

A self-proclaimed health and wellness company contracted statisticians to examine the efficacy of their newly developed dieting program. They provided the statisticians with data from a publicized weight loss competition that they hosted to advertise the release of their new product. For the competition, participants completed the dieting program and were ranked in order of the amount of weight they lost pre- and post-completion of the program. What statistical analysis could the statisticians perform to assess the efficacy of the dieting program?

thanks