What is the Likert Scale?

Named after its inventor, Rensis Likert, the Likert scale is a tool used by researchers in questionnaires to determine responses by rating some items. It is commonly used interchangeably with the rating scale though there are other types of rating scales. This is because it is the generally used approach in survey research.

How is the Likert Scale Used? 

With this psychometric scale, respondents are asked to rate items on a level of agreement, as follow: Strongly agree Agree Neutral Disagree Strongly disagree. The scale uses different alternatives on themes like agreement, frequency, quality and importance. For example Agreement: strongly agree to strongly disagree Frequency: often to never Quality: very good to very bad Likelihood: definitely to never Importance: very important to unimportant. These items are called the Likert Scale Response Anchors 

Steps to Developing a Likert Scale

1. Define the focus the focus of whatever topic to be measured should be uncomplicated. For example, Customer Service or This Website.
2. Generate the Likert Scale items - The items to be put on the scale should ratable. For example, polite/rude could be rated as very polite, polite, not polite or very impolite. Politeness could also be rated on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is not polite at all and 10 is extremely polite.
3. Rate the Likert Scale items - If one want to be sure his focus is good, a previous rating should be carried out on items to be put on the scale in order to weed out the items that are mostly seen as unfavorable.
4. Administer the Likert Scale test. The Likert scale data is usually classified as an ordinal variables, as it is usually difficult to find the mean and average from items such as agree, disagree, and neutral because you don't know the distance between the data items. This is because the distance between variables must be constant.

Statistics one can use are:

• The mode: the most common response.
• The median: the middle response when all items are placed in order.
• The rangeand interquartile range: to show variability.
• A bar chartor frequency table: to show a table of results.