for a university project I'm doing a literature review and I have a dataset where each line represents one paper and then I scored the data for two variables which each come in three levels: level of uptake where each paper can have either no uptake, desired uptake, or actual uptake and level of empowerment where each paper can either have no empowerment, some empowerment, or strong empowerment (not what they're actually called but you get the idea).

Now I want to find out if papers with e.g. a high level of uptake are also more likely to have a high level of empowerment. So I'm guessing I'd have to transform my three categories into numbers 1-3 and then do some kind of correlation test/test of independence? But I'm very unsure which one would be the right one and how to go about it. After a lot of time spent on google to try and figure it out, I'm now more confused than I was before. Mostly because every post I find about similar cases says something different and I lack the statistical knowledge to know what applies to my case and what doesn't. So, if anyone could help me figure out how to do something like this in R (keeping in mind that I'm a complete novice to R and statistics in general) I'd be eternally grateful!