Obviously, the categories need to be ordinal so that you can order them. Maybe you have levels such as "bad", "ok", "good", and "excellent"? The way that you convert these to numbers will affect your answer. You can recode those levels as 1,2,3,4, or you might decide that "bad" and "excellent" have more extreme values, and so you recode as 0, 2,3,5. There is some terse discussion of this in the doc for the SCORES statement of the FREQ procedure: http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/procstat/63963/HTML/default/viewer.htm#procstat_freq_a0000000560.htm#procstat.freq.freqscores For a technical consideration of whether you should do this, along with instructions how, see Analysis of Ordinal Categorical Data by Alan Agresti. You can also try an internet seach using terms such as Ordinal Categories Rank Ridit Scores.
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