Likert Scale: Examples, Points and How to Analyse It

Picture the feedback form at the end of a course: “I could follow the explanations easily”, with five boxes underneath running from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”. Almost everyone has ticked one of those boxes without ever learning what the format is called.

It is called a Likert scale. A Likert scale measures attitudes by putting several statements about the same topic on one shared set of graded answer options, usually five or seven steps running from clear disagreement to clear agreement, and then combining the answers to those statements into a single score for each respondent. By the end of this article you will know how many steps your scale needs, how to label them and what you are allowed to calculate afterwards.

📌 Key points at a glance

• Rensis Likert introduced the method in his 1932 doctoral thesis.
• A single question is a Likert item, not a Likert scale.
• The British Social Attitudes survey scores its five-point scales 1 to 5.
• Every step gets a word, not just the two ends.
• Likert himself never claimed the steps were equally spaced.

What is a Likert scale?

A Likert scale is a measurement technique from social research in which respondents agree or disagree with several statements about the same topic, each time using the same graded answer options. The individual answers are then combined into a total or average score describing that person’s attitude.

The technique goes back to the American social psychologist Rensis Likert, who set it out in his 1932 doctoral thesis at Columbia University, published as issue 140 of the Archives of Psychology under the title A Technique for the Measurement of Attitudes. What drove him was economy rather than theory: the established methods of his day demanded elaborate preliminary studies, and he wanted to know whether something simpler would do. It would. His scale on attitudes towards international relations reached the same reliability with 24 statements as a rival method did with 44 (Likert 1932, p. 33). Half the questions, the same quality of result, which is precisely why the format now sits in almost every questionnaire.

In psychology an instrument of this kind is called a psychometric scale. It measures something that cannot be observed directly through answers that can be observed. Attitude, satisfaction and motivation are invisible. What is visible is which box somebody ticks.

A Likert item and a Likert scale are not the same thing

This distinction is skipped almost everywhere, teaching material included. A single question with five graded options is a Likert item. A Likert scale only comes into being once you ask several such items about the same characteristic and combine their values into one figure. Likert puts it plainly in the original: each statement is “a scale in itself”, and the individual scores are then combined using a median or a mean (Likert 1932, p. 24).

In a dissertation this is the point where a viva can turn awkward. Calling one question a “Likert scale” and then averaging it packs two mistakes into a single sentence. Asking six statements about content, pace, supervision, materials, room and organisation and building a satisfaction score from them, by contrast, is a scale.

One tick box is an item. It only becomes a scale through several items and a shared analysis.

Our reading tip: Likert’s original paper is freely available and, at 55 pages, far shorter than the reputation of a classic suggests. Anyone citing it properly will need to open it anyway.

Likert scale examples: how British surveys word their steps

The question people actually run into is not what a Likert scale is, but what the steps should be called. Britain has an unusually good reference for that, because the country’s longest-running attitude survey publishes its wording in full.

The British Social Attitudes survey, run by NatCen Social Research, builds several attitude scales from batteries of statements. The technical documentation states that respondents are invited to “agree strongly”, “agree”, “neither agree nor disagree”, “disagree” or “disagree strongly”.

The agreement wording is taken from NatCen Social Research, British Social Attitudes 42, Technical Details.

How the British Social Attitudes survey turns those words into numbers

NatCen scores the most libertarian or most pro-welfare position as 1 and the opposite end as 5, with “neither agree nor disagree” scored as 3. Several items are then combined into one index per respondent, which is exactly the procedure Likert described in 1932.

The documentation also reports how well those indices hold together. For the 2024 survey, Cronbach’s alpha is given as 0.83 for the left–right scale, 0.79 for the libertarian–authoritarian scale and 0.88 for the welfarism scale. That figure is worth copying into your own write-up, because it is the standard evidence that your items measure one thing rather than several.

The agreement scale and its catch

Agree-disagree wording is the version most people reach for first, and it does work. It also produces measurably more agreement than a scale that asks about the thing itself, an effect known as acquiescence.

Wherever you could ask “How important are short waiting times to you: extremely important to not important at all” instead of “Short waiting times are important to me: agree”, the second form is the better choice. It is one of the few pieces of questionnaire advice that is uncontested in the methods literature and almost never followed in practice.

How many points should a Likert scale have?

Five to seven steps is the working rule. Scales of that length measure reliably, distinguish finely enough and are the ones respondents prefer, which is why they dominate published survey instruments.

Behind the rule sits a trade-off between two failures. Too few steps force different opinions into the same box, and the difference you set out to measure disappears. Too many steps make the individual step meaningless: who could explain what separates point 8 from point 9 on an eleven-point scale?

Five, six or seven points: what actually changes

An odd number has a middle, an even number does not. That is the real difference, not the fineness of the gradation. A six-point Likert scale is therefore mainly a forced choice: anyone who is undecided still has to pick a side.

Whether that is good or bad depends on the purpose. In an evaluation meant to prompt improvements, a forced lean is often useful, because a column of middle ticks helps nobody. In an opinion survey, where genuine indecision is a finding in its own right, it distorts.

Does your scale need a neutral middle?

The middle category is the most argued-over single decision in scale design, and both sides have real arguments. Both fit into a few lines.

What the middle gives you

• People who are genuinely undecided can say so.
• Neutral respondents do not drift into a wrong neighbouring step.
• The scale stays symmetrical on both sides.

What you accept in return

• The middle also gets ticked out of convenience.
• Some choose it instead of saying “don’t know”.
• Your analysis cannot tell those two apart.

The British Social Attitudes survey settles the question by offering “neither agree nor disagree” and scoring it as the midpoint, 3. Curiously, Rensis Likert never discussed the issue at all: in his 1932 paper the “undecided” category appears purely as a scoring instruction, with the value 3 (Likert 1932, appendix).

How to create a Likert scale, step by step

You do not build a Likert scale by writing one question and putting five boxes next to it. You build it by breaking a characteristic into several statements that all mean the same thing but come at it from different angles.

The six steps below work for a course evaluation just as well as for the empirical chapter of a dissertation. Allow more time for the first step than for all the others combined.

1. Define the characteristic. Write down in one sentence what you want to measure. “Satisfaction with the course” is a characteristic, “opinions about the course” is not.
2. Write the statements. Five to ten short sentences, each carrying exactly one idea. Two topics in one sentence make the answer useless.
3. Reverse some of them. Word part of your statements negatively so that anyone ticking the same column throughout stands out. Likert already recommends this in the appendix of his 1932 paper.
4. Pick a scale and keep it. Decide once for five or seven points and use the same one across the whole questionnaire.
5. Label every point. Each step gets a word, not just the two ends. Numbers on their own are not enough.
6. Run a pilot. Ask five people who do not know your topic to complete it, then ask them how they read the middle step.

Technically a Likert scale is a matrix question: several statements underneath each other, the same answer scale alongside. In empirio.ai, an online survey tool from Germany, you set it up as a matrix question and define the scale once for all statements. How to build the rest of the questionnaire around it is covered in the guide to creating a questionnaire.

That layout is exactly what the term matrix question means: the scale appears once as a column header, and every row below it is a separate statement about the same characteristic. The four rows in the example add up to one satisfaction score, while a single row on its own is only a Likert item.

Is a Likert scale ordinal or interval?

A single Likert item is ordinal. You know that “agree” means more agreement than “neither agree nor disagree”, but you do not know whether the gap between those two steps is the same size as the gap between “neither” and “disagree”.

The combined score from several items, by contrast, is usually treated in research practice as if it were interval data. That is a convention with a rationale rather than a mathematical truth: the more items feed into the score, the finer the resulting scale becomes, and the less the unevenness of the individual steps matters.

If you want to look the terms up: the ordinal scale only knows a rank order, while the interval scale adds equal distances. Which calculations belong to which level is set out in the overview of levels of measurement.

What Rensis Likert actually wrote about it

This is where the original repays a look, because it says something different from what is commonly claimed. Likert claimed equal units only for his laborious sigma method, never for the simple practice of assigning the numbers 1 to 5.

His Table II shows both side by side. The five steps of one of his statements carry the sigma values −1.63, −0.43, +0.43, +0.99 and +1.76 (Likert 1932, p. 23). The gaps are therefore 1.20, then 0.86, then 0.56, then 0.77. Anyone assigning 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 instead is asserting the same gap four times over. Likert knew this and justified the shortcut on purely practical grounds: the two methods correlated at +0.99, so the simpler calculation was defensible “for all ordinary purposes” (Likert 1932, p. 43).

Two things follow for you. First, “ordinal or interval” has no single correct answer, only a decision. Second, that decision does not need an argument, it needs a rule you stick to and justify in your methods chapter.

Does a Likert scale require a normal distribution?

No, your collected data do not have to be normally distributed for a Likert scale to be appropriate. The confusion arises because Likert assumed, for his sigma calculation, that attitudes are distributed roughly normally in the population.

He immediately added that he was fully aware of the dangers of that assumption, that it was only an experimental step and that further work should either render it unnecessary or prove it justified (Likert 1932, p. 22). For a straightforward analysis using the numbers 1 to 5 the assumption plays no part at all. Normality becomes relevant again only when you apply particular statistical tests to your scale scores.

How to analyse a Likert scale: median, mean or frequencies?

The analysis depends on whether you are holding a single item or a scale built from several items. That one distinction settles most of the arguments you would otherwise have with a supervisor.

For a single item the frequency distribution is the most honest presentation, meaning the share of respondents at each step. The median (= the value in the middle of all ordered answers) and the mode (= the most frequently chosen step) fit alongside it. A mean over a single ordinal item is open to challenge, because it assumes equal distances you cannot evidence.

For a scale built from several items you first form the total or average score per person and then work on with that figure. This is exactly what Likert proposed (Likert 1932, p. 26). Before that you check whether the items measure the same thing at all, usually via Cronbach’s alpha, the same statistic NatCen reports for the British Social Attitudes scales. Which methods come next is covered in the overview of analysis methods.

Collapsing a Likert scale: the top-two box

Market research routinely merges the two agreeing steps into a single figure, known as the top-two box. “Agree” and “agree strongly” then become one percentage that is easy to report in a presentation.

That is legitimate and often sensible, but it costs information. Once you merge, you can no longer see whether the agreement is made up of convinced or of cautious answers. Report both: the top-two box and the full distribution.

💡 Tip

Always record how many people skipped a statement. A mean based on 40 answers and one based on 120 look identical in a table and are not.

Common mistakes with Likert scales

The five mistakes below turn up in club surveys as readily as in undergraduate dissertations. All of them only show up during analysis, when the answers are already in and nothing can be changed.

What they have in common is that half an hour before you send the survey out is enough to fix them. Afterwards it is not.

Asking for agreement where a direct question would work

Scales of the “agree, disagree” type systematically produce more agreement than scales that ask about the thing itself. Rather than “I am satisfied with the course: agree”, ask “How satisfied are you with the course: very satisfied to very dissatisfied”. Item-specific wording removes the pull towards saying yes.

Labelling only the two ends

A scale with “very dissatisfied” on the left, “very satisfied” on the right and nothing but numbers in between is quick to build and worse. Fully labelled scales achieve higher reliability and validity, and respondents prefer them. The British Social Attitudes survey labels every point of its agreement scale, which is a useful precedent to cite.

Numbering with negative values

Numbering from −2 to +2 looks symmetrical but does not behave symmetrically. Respondents avoid the negative side and answer more positively overall than they would on a 1 to 5 numbering. Keep the numbers positive and let the words carry the direction.

Changing the scale halfway through

If the first half of your statements uses five points and the second half seven, you cannot analyse them together. Nor can you run the order from disagreement to agreement in one block and the other way round in the next without reversing the values before analysis.

Two statements in one sentence

“The course was well structured and easy to follow” measures two things. Anyone who liked the structure but not the explanations cannot answer, and ticks the middle. Likert described such double-barrelled statements as grounds for exclusion back in 1932. How to keep questions clean is covered in the guide to question types in surveys.

Conclusion

The Likert scale is so widespread because it measures reliably for very little effort, and it is so often misused because it looks simple. Two things will keep you clear of most of the traps: a scale needs several statements, and every step needs a word. Everything else, from the number of points to the middle category, is a trade-off you can justify in your methods section. Only one claim should never be taken on trust, textbooks included: that the steps are equally spaced. Rensis Likert never said so.

Where to go next

• Want to sort out the types of scale? Rating scale: unipolar, bipolar and how many points
• Need the right level of measurement? Determining the level of measurement
• Building the whole questionnaire? Creating a questionnaire: structure and order
• Want to know whether your results hold? Objectivity, reliability and validity

Scale ready, survey still missing?

With empirio.ai, an online survey tool from Germany, you set your Likert statements up as a matrix question and share the survey as a link or a QR code.

Create a survey with a Likert scale