I would like to find out if there is any impact of social media on the creation of entrepreneurial opportunities for entrepreneurs.

I have two groups (Online Business and traditional Business) and 20 statements in total that I have measured using a 5 point Likert scale (strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, strongly disagree; and also not applicable, as suggested by my supervisor).

Those who run traditional business chose "not applicable" for a lot of statements and I am now perplexed how to deal with this not applicable option! They are not missing values so I cannot ignore them as they bear important information about the traditional business group. My supervisor told me that I cannot even score this as 0 or 6. I am using R and R ignores not Applicable option while calculating correlation and even for other calculations as well.

Moreover, I tried factor analysis but this "not applicable" option is creating problems in every step.

I am new to deal with Likert scales and confused how to proceed with my data to figure out the answer of my research question.