I have a question. I have a mixed type of data (contninous and ordinal (binary and with more than three categories) and I checked the new version of psych and now allows to select among different correlation matrices and you can especify correlation as mixed and it will compute continous with Pearson and polychoric for ordinal with more than 2 categories or tetrachoric for the dichotomous version.

My problem is how I indicate which ones are ordinal and which ones are continous. I tried in a subset to apply factor but if does not allow this type of data:

data <- lapply(data, as.factor)
#Scree plot
fa.parallel(data, fm =   
 "mle",cor="poly",fa="fa") 

This gives an error. If I remove lapply it works but then if I want to use the mixed correlation how I can differentiate them with ordinal?
Thank you in advance