The RSquared Academy blog has a two-parter on handling categorical data in R. Part 1 elaborates on kinds of categorical data and introduces a case study:
While we can rank the categories, we cannot assign a value to them. For example, in satisfaction ranking, we cannot say that like is twice as positive as dislike i.e. we are unable to say how much they differ from each other. While the order or rank of data is meaningful, the difference between two pieces of data cannot be measured/determined or are meaningless. Ordinal data provide information about relative comparisons, but not the magnitude of the differences.
Part 2 shows off ways to work with categorical data in tables:
In this section, we will explore the above ways of summarizing categorical data. We will also spend some time learning about tables as you will be using them extensively while working with categorical data. R has many packages for tabulating data and we list and explore all of them in the R scripts shared in the GitHub repository.
Click through for both guides. H/T R-Bloggers.