Hello,

I am a beginner of R but knowing SPSS and matlab.

I need to analyse my data with a mixed type cluster analysis, that's why I
am looking into R.

I have a datasheet with 45 subjects (rows) and 30 variables of each subjet
(columns) in Excel (datasheet.csv) or SPSS (datasheet.sav).

In SPSS I can define if the variable is ordinal (e.g.  low - intermediate -
high), nominal (e.g. type of hobby) or scale (e.g. age).
The variables are all numerical (as SPSS needs them in numbers coding the
ordinal or nominal qualities).

However, when using data importing like

mydata<-read.spss("datasheet.sav")
or
mydata<-read.table("datasheet.csv", sep=",",na="",stringsAsFactors=F)

this produces a 'list' and not a 'data frame' with factors.

My question: How can I import the "measure" (i.e. nominal, ordinal, scale)
form SPSS?
Or how can I define variables in mydata as nominal or ordinal, even if they
consist of numbers?

Thanks in advance!

Markus
RStudio 0.97.551 on MacOSX 10.6.8

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

