LIKERT SCALE

INTRODUCTION

Summated scales (or Likert-type scales) are developed by utilizing the item analysis approach
wherein a particular item is evaluated on the basis of how well it discriminates between those
persons whose total score is high and those whose score is low. Those items or statements
that best meet this sort of discrimination test are included in the final instrument. Thus,
summated scales consist of a number of statements which express either a favourable or
unfavourable attitude towards the given object to which the respondent is asked to react. The
respondent indicates his agreement or disagreement with each statement in the instrument.
Each response is given a numerical score, indicating its favourableness or unfavourableness,
and the scores are totalled to measure the respondent’s attitude. In other words, the overall
score represents the respondent’s position on the continuum of favourable-unfavourableness
towards an issue. Most frequently used summated scales in the study of social attitudes
follow the pattern devised by Likert. For this reason they are often referred to as Likert-type
scales.

MEANING

In a Likert scale, the respondent is asked to respond to each of the statements in terms of
several degrees, usually five degrees (but at times 3 or 7 may also be used) of agreement or
disagreement. For example, when asked to express opinion whether one considers his job
quite pleasant, the respondent may respond in any one of the following ways

1. Strongly Agree
2. Agree
3. Undecided
4. Disagree
5. Strongly Disagree.
We find that these five points constitute the scale. At one extreme of the scale there is strong
agreement with the given statement and at the other, strong disagreement, and between them
lie intermediate points.

Each point on the scale carries a score. Response indicating the least favourable degree of job
satisfaction is given the least score (say 1) and the most favourable is given the highest score
(say 5). These score—values are normally not printed on the instrument but are shown here
just to indicate the scoring pattern. The Likert scaling technique, thus, assigns a scale value to
each of the five responses. The same thing is done in respect of each and every statement in
the instrument. This way the instrument yields a total score for each respondent, which would
then measure the respondent’s favourableness toward the given point of view. If the
instrument consists of, say 30 statements, the following score values would be revealing. 30 ×
5 = 150 Most favourable response possible 30 × 3 = 90 A neutral attitude 30 × 1 = 30 Most
unfavourable attitude. The scores for any individual would fall between 30 and 150. If the
score happens to be above 90, it shows favourable opinion to the given point of view, a score
of below 90 would mean unfavourable opinion and a score of exactly 90 would be suggestive
of a neutral attitude.

DEFINITION

 A Likert scale is a psychometric scale commonly involved in research that employs

questionnaires. It is the most widely used approach to scaling responses in survey
research, such that the term is often used interchangeably with rating scale, although
there are other types of rating scales.

 A Likert scale is a rating scale, often found on survey forms, that measures how
people feel about something.
CHARACTERITICS
The Likert scale came into existence in 1932 in the form of the 5-point scale which these
days, is extensively used. These scales range from a group of generic topics to the most
specific ones that ask people to indicate how much do they agree or disagree, approve or
disapprove, or believe it is true or false. Some major characteristics of the Likert scale,
are:
 Multiple-choice questions: Likert scale questions are usually multiple-choice
questions which have minimum two or three measurable categories.
 Related answers: Items should be easily related to the answers in the sentence,
regardless of whether the relationship between item and sentence is evident.
 Scale type: The items must always have two extreme positions as well as an
intermediate item that serves as a graduation between the extremes.
 Number of answer options: It is important to mention that although the most
common Likert scale is that of 5 items, the use of more items helps to generate greater
precision in the results.
 Increasing reliability of the scale: The ends of the scale are often increased to create
a seven-point scale by adding “very” to the top and bottom of the five-point scales. It
has been shown that the seven-point scale reaches the upper limits of the reliability of
the scale.
 Using wide scales: As a general rule, Likert and others recommend that it be better to
use a scale as wide as possible. One can always collapse the answers into concise
groups, if appropriate, for analysis.
 Lack of a neutral option: By considering these details, scales are sometimes
curtailed to an even number of categories (usually four) to eliminate the “neutral”
option on a “forced choice” survey scale.
 Intrinsic variable: The primary Likert record clearly states that there could be an
intrinsic variable whose value marks the feedbacks or attitudes of the respondents and
this underlying variable is the interval level, at best.
 Reliable scales: The items on the scale should always be safe and reliable. To achieve
reliability it is sometimes necessary to sacrifice the accuracy of the scale.
PROCEDURE
The procedure for developing a Likert-type scale is as follows:

1. As a first step, the researcher collects a large number of statements which are relevant
to the attitude being studied and each of the statements expresses definite
favourableness or unfavourableness to a particular point of view or the attitude and
that the number of favourable and unfavourable statements is approximately equal.
2. After the statements have been gathered, a trial test should be administered to a
number of subjects. In other words, a small group of people, from those who are
going to be studied finally, are asked to indicate their response to each statement by
checking one of the categories of agreement or disagreement using a five point scale
as stated above.
3. The response to various statements are scored in such a way that a response indicative
of the most favourable attitude is given the highest score of 5 and that with the most
unfavourable attitude is given the lowest score, say, of 1.
4. Then the total score of each respondent is obtained by adding his scores that he
received for separate statements.
5. The next step is to array these total scores and find out those statements which have a
high discriminatory power. For this purpose, the researcher may select some part of
the highest and the lowest total scores, say the top 25 per cent and the bottom 25 per
cent. These two extreme groups are interpreted to represent the most favourable and
the least favourable attitudes and are used as criterion groups by which to evaluate
individual statements. This way we determine which statements consistently correlate
with low favourability and which with high favourability.
6. Only those statements that correlate with the total test should be retained in the final
instrument and all others must be discarded from it.
TYPES OF LIKERT SCALE

Types of Likert Scale with Examples

The Likert scale has become a favourite amongst researchers to collect opinions
about customer satisfaction or employee satisfaction. This scale can be primarily divided into
two major types:

 Even Likert Scale

 Odd Likert Scale

Even Likert Scale: In case the researcher intends to gain extreme feedback without
providing a neutral option.

 2-Point Likert Scale of Agreement: The most easy to use Likert scale question
which has only two answer options.

 4-Point Likert Scale for Importance: This type of Likert scale allows researchers to
include 4 extreme options without the provision of a neutral option. Here the various
degrees of importance are represented in a 4-Point Likert Scale.

 8-Point Likelihood of recommendation: This is a variation of the previously

explained 4-point Likert scale, the only difference being, this scale has 8 options to
collect feedback about likelihood of recommendation.

Odd Likert Scale: In case the researcher intends to give the respondents the choice of
responding in a neutral manner, the scale will be considered to be Odd Likert Scale.

 5-Point Likert Scale: With 5 answer options, this odd Likert scale question is used to
gather information about a topic by including a neutral answer option for respondents
to select in case they don’t wish to answer from the extreme choices.

 7-Point Likert Scale: With 7 answer options, this odd Likert scale question is used to
gather information about a topic by including a neutral answer option for respondents
to select in case they don’t wish to answer from the extreme choices.
  9-Point Likert Scale: With 9 answer options, this odd Likert scale question is used to
gather information about a topic by including a neutral answer option for respondents
to select in case they don’t wish to answer from the extreme choices.

ADVANTAGES

The Likert-type scale has several advantages. Mention may be made of the important ones.

 It is relatively easy to construct the Likert-type scale in comparison to Thurstone-type

scale because Likert-type scale can be performed without a panel of judges.
 Likert-type scale is considered more reliable because under it respondents answer
each statement included in the instrument..
 Each statement, included in the Likert-type scale, is given an empirical test for
discriminating ability and as such, unlike Thurstone-type scale, the Likert-type scale
permits the use of statements that are not manifestly related (to have a direct
relationship) to the attitude being studied.
 Likert-type scale can easily be used in respondent-centred and stimulus-centred
studies i.e., through it we can study how responses differ between people and how
responses differ between stimuli.
 Likert-type scale takes much less time to construct, it is frequently used by the
students of opinion research. Moreover, it has been reported in various research
studies* that there is high degree of correlation between Likert-type scale and
Thurstone-type scale.

LIMITATIONS

Following are the limitations of Likert scale-

 We can simply examine whether respondents are more or less favourable to a topic,
but we cannot tell how much more or less they are. There is no basis for belief that the
five positions indicated on the scale are equally spaced. The interval between
‘strongly agree’ and ‘agree’, may not be equal to the interval between “agree” and
“undecided”. This means that Likert scale does not rise to a stature more than that of
an ordinal scale.
  The total score of an individual respondent has little clear meaning since a given total
score can be secured by a variety of answer patterns. It is unlikely that the respondent
can validly react to a short statement on a printed form in the absence of real-life
qualifying situations.
 There remains a possibility that people may answer according to what they think they
should feel rather than how they do feel.
 Likert scales need to vary consistently around their central point; heavily skewed
Likert scales call into question any statistics we might make, and even the very
construction of the scales themselves. This isn’t to say that such skewed scales are
unusable, but we need to take care with down-line processing and the generality of
any results we draw from them.

LIKERT TABLE
CONCLUSION

A typical item in a Likert scale is a statement to which respondents rate their

level of agreement. The statement may be positive (e.g., “The terminology used
in this interface is clear”) or negative (e.g., “I found the navigation
options confusing”). Usually a five-point scale of agreement like the following is
used:

1. Strongly disagree

2. Disagree

3. Neither agree nor disagree

4. Agree

5. Strongly agree

In the original version of the scale, Likert (1932) provided “anchor terms” for
each point on the scale, such as Agree, and did not use numbers. Some people
prefer to use a seven-point scale, but it gets a bit more difficult to come up with
descriptive terms for each point as you get to higher numbers. This is one reason
many researchers have dropped the intervening labels and just label the two ends
(or anchor points) and perhaps the middle, or neutral, point. Many variations on
Likert scales are still used today, but most Likert-scale purists would say that the
two main characteristics of a Likert scale are (1) it expresses a degree of
agreement with a statement and (2) it uses an odd number of response options,
thus allowing a neutral response. By convention, the “Strongly Agree” end of a
Likert scale is generally shown on the right when presented horizontally.

In designing the statements for Likert scales, you need to be careful how you
word them. You should avoid adverbs such as very, extremely, or absolutely in
the statements and use unmodified versions of adjectives. For example, the
statement “This website is beautiful” may yield results that are quite different
from “This website is absolutely beautiful,” which may decrease the likelihood of
strong agreement.

REFERNCES

 https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/likert-scale
 https://www.simplypsychology.org/likert-scale-examples.jpg
 https://businessjargons.com/likert-scale.html
 file:///C:/Users/anushka%20sharma/AppData/Local/Packages/microsoft.wi
ndowscommunicationsapps_8wekyb3d8bbwe/LocalState/Files/S0/11/Atta
chments/Research%20Methodology%20C%20R%20Kothari%20(Eng)%2
01.81%20MB[156].pdf