我应该使用整数还是字符串来声明这个属性?

I'm building an app with Ruby on Rails to mesure demographic variables. Right now, I have a doubt about how to declare the type of data from two attributes of a model (stats) that belongs to a users model. This attributes are "genere" and "civil status". I know that elements could be string data but if I pretend make some statistics with this info, I'm building an app with Ruby on Rails to mesur