Hello list I'm just beginning my PhD and am likely to be using lots of surveys in my data collection, and am wanting to get my head around the ideas about how best to approach the tasks in R. The data sets I have collected so far for some preliminary practise with are made up of the following survey data: (1) 25 observations x 15 variables of dichotomous nominal (categorical) data [basically, yes/ no responses with a couple of missing values] (2) 25 obs x 14 var of ordinal rank data [5 item Likert-scale, with some missing values], and (3) 23 observations of free text, typically in the form of one sentence or statement, and I will be using RQDA for that part. So far, I have been able to piece together that I can use the Spearman method of the wilcox.text for #2 (ordinal data), but have yet to find anything that I can do for the nominal data. I was thinking of using frequency tables, but I don't seem to be able to find out too much info on it/ how to do that. Anyway, I have three questions that I'd appreciate members of this list taking a swing at for ideas please. (a) what types of analyses are available to apply to the data types above? I have been thinking about MCA using FactoMineR as well as MDS using MASS to visualise the data in high dimensional space, but I think that I haven't (yet!) figured out how to properly prepare my data sets for these, and most texts and tutorials seem to focus mostly on quantitative data analysis. (b) is there anyway that I can automate the Spearman process so that it iterates across the set, otherwise it looks like I may have to manually take the two columns and keep comparing pairs until I have correlated all of the columns with all of the other columns - so is there anyway that I can automate this and get the test statistics and p values dumped in a table for summarising? (c) after using RQDA to code the statements, is it feasible to reintroduce those codes back into the data set to explore correlations among the other columns and the units of coded text to see what variables co-occur? Well, thanks for taking the time to read this - and I look forward to any thoughts/ suggestions that might help. Cheers