Thanks Mark for sticking with me so far! I've tried collapsing the levels together and doing all the things you mentioned. And silly silly me, I realized that I've been looking at the actual counts, forgetting that they're not the same as expected counts, which is what you were saying earlier, that validity is based not on zero counts but expected counts less than 5. I already knew this but it just went over my head. Anyways, sorry about that. Looking now at my results after making all the changes and adjustments you suggested, it seems with my data, theres always this one (or two) lingering cell(s) that have expected counts less than 1 like in the below example (Figure 1).
I found this guideline at a website: "If both variables have 4 to 6 levels, then you can trust the results if either of the following is true:
1. All cells have expected counts of at least 2.
2. All cells have expected counts of at least 1, and 50% or fewer of the cells have expected counts of less than 5."
And so I'm hoping to at least satisfy the second point but as you can see, one of the cells under Neutral/D/SD, doesn't quite cut it. In the end though, after getting your suggestion (as well as others from forums) to use other association tests for ordinal data, I'll try to experiment using other tests suited for ordinal data if theres not much more I can do. But I'd still like to get your thoughts about whether theres anyway I might be able eventually utilize the chisquare method for this data. Unless, you strongly suggest that I just move on from this and use association tests for ordinal data since it would give better results.
Also, I'm not exactly sure how to do ordinal measures of association on JMP but I'm guessing that when you use the Fit Y by X function, it automatically does all these tests for you depending on what your data is like. As I found when I clicked the orange tab button next to "Contingency.." and selected Measures of Association, it showed me all these outputs for a lot of different tests (figure 2), some of which I recognized as tests for ordinal data like Somers'd. Is this how I find the analysis results for different tests without having to manually select the right test like how SPSS would require you to do?
Figure 1
Figure 2