How to proceed with likert scale items when "Not Applicable" is another option with 5 point likert scale?

Question

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 5 point likert scale (strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, strongly disagree and Not applicable(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 calcations as well. Moreover, I tried factor analysis but this "not applicable" option is creating problem in every step.

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

Answer 1

It appears to me that this would not matter so much for certain purely descriptive analyses such as frequencies (and may even be of interest!) but it would definitely matter for more advanced statistical analyses (e.g., correlation/regression/ANOVA). Could you treat those individuals who responded "n/a" as a separate group? If you cannot treat "n/a" as missing for theoretical reasons then this seems to be the only option (other than excluding those participants entirely, at least for the variables in question).