Hello!

I have quite a large data set which was cultivated by the British Electorate Survey in 2017. My dependent variables and independent variables I am looking at have N ≈ 2100.

I want to look at the relationship between a few IV's and DV, and whether (if I'm lucky) there is any casual relationship. I'm doing some bivariate analyses and multiple regression with my DV and IV to see this.

Example variables:

DV: Attitudes towards economy vs environment, 10 point ordinal scale.
IV 1: Age (18-100) ratio variable.
IV 2: Education level, 5 point ordinal scale.
IV 3: Twitter user, dummy variable.

I've read Richard Williams interesting article on 'Ordinal Independent Variables' and I was wondering, can I apply this logic to my dependent ordinal variable? Furthermore, how could I go about justifying treating ordinal variables as a continuous? I thought about perhaps doing two separate sections where I say: here I shall treat my DV as a continuous variable and vice versa, but I'm not completely sure on how to explain my reasoning.

I've been looking on this website for anyone in a similar boat to me, and have heard about ordered logistic regression and pca, but I'm not completely sure on how I would use them.

Lastly, bit of a silly question, but if I do regression between my DV and IV, while treating my DV as categorical, would my code be: regress i.DV IV

Thank you in advance and appreciate any help!