Likert Scale

Using Likert Scale in Surveys

When designing a survey you always start with the goal in mind – the purpose of the survey. Next is creating a list of questions (designing survey questionnaire) and deciding how the respondents will answer your survey questions. What answering options should you give to the survey respondents and how you are going to collect and analyze the survey results?                                          

There are different survey answering options and one of them is the Likert Scale for rating survey responses. The Likert Scale or Likert Rating Method is very effective for allowing survey respondents to express different feelings, opinions and agreements or disagreements. The Likert Scale is very effective for scoring and ranking your survey results. By using the Likert Scale your survey respondents are generally asked to rank their agreement or disagreement with a particular statement and respondents have the option of choosing one answer.

This example demonstrates how you can use the Likert Scale to structure your survey questions. Now there are different options how you can score your survey responses. Let's take a look at this example.

One scoring alternative is to assign values to the survey responses as follow:

By using this approach the overall score of the survey example will be 2 + 1 -1 + 1 = 3

The following is another survey rating approach you can use:

By using the second approach the overall score of the survey example will be 5 + 4 + 2 + 4 = 15. The frequently used scale is 1 to 5. By using this scale 3 would be an average score. In our example if you divide the overall survey score which is 15 by the number of questions which is 4 the average value will be 3.75. In this simple example we can say that we scored above average and we can make a conclusion that the prices are high and the strength of the business is excellent service whereas product quality and on time delivery are above average.

The Likert Scale is very effective because allows customers to express their feelings and opinions in a very short time which is crucial for success of any survey. Your goal is to get as much information as you can in very little time. You can not afford to take much of your customers' time because your response rate will drop drastically as well as the accuracy of customer survey responses.

Consistency of Response

You can use Standard Deviation as a tool to measure the consistency of response on the Likert Scale. Examples for different consistency of survey responses by using the Likert Scale:

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