I have not performed any calculations using GEEs before, and I am having a bit of trouble knowing how to get started. I am using RStudio.

I have baseline survey data along with some sociodemographic characteristics (categorical data) that I would like to incorporate into the model as independent variables/covariates. I want to use GEEs to know how the participants responses to question1 (numerical value) predicts their response to question2 (numerical value).

Here is an example of my dataset
Study id Marital Status Gender question1 question2
1 Married Female 2 4
2 Single Female 1 6
3 Single Male 4 7

I am unsure on how to get started with using the gee r packages for this type of data, and how to organize the formula. Do I have to transform my categorical variables to binary/dummy variables?