For my thesis, I will use surveys and want to answer two research questions, one of which is "How important are X reasons, Y reasons, and Z reasons compared with each other?"

I have a list of about two dozen reasons that participants can choose from in the questionnaires (no restrictions on which to choose) and I will be grouping them into three types of reasons - X, Y and Z. All of these reasons are given by participants to explain a type of behavior they engaged in (behavior is the same, it's a type of action they all took). This behavior is measured as the frequency of the action (no. of times performed / no. of years in the measured period).

I have two questions:

Does this mean I have one independent categorical/nominal variable with three levels (X/Y/Z reasons) and one dependent metric/ratio variable (behavior)? Or do I have three independent categorical/nominal variables with one dependent metric/ratio variable?…