In this article, we mainly study certain families of continuous retractions (r-skeletons) having certain rich properties. By using monotonically retractable spaces we solve a question posed by R. Z. Buzyakova in [6] concerning the Alexandroff duplicate of a space. Certainly, it is shown that if the space X has a full r-skeleton, then its Alexandroff duplicate also has a full r-skeleton and, in a very similar way, it is proved that the Alexandroff duplicate of a monotonically retractable space is monotonically retractable. The notion of q-skeleton is introduced and it is shown that every compact subspace of Cp(X) is Corson when X has a full q-skeleton. The notion of strong r-skeleton is also introduced to answer a question suggested by F. Casarrubias-Segura and R. Rojas-Hernández in their paper [7] by establishing that a space X is monotonically Sokolov iff it is monotonically ω-monolithic and has a strong r-skeleton. The techniques used here allow us to give a topological proof of a result of I. Bandlow [4] who used elementary submodels and uniform spaces.2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 54C99, 54C15, 54E20.