A Critique of Likert-Response Items in Social Science Research

This chapter critiques the use of the Likert response items for scale development. Likert response data when as nominal data and analyzed as nominal data is useful for recording and analyzing participants' attitudes about a topic. However, it is illogical for researchers who use Likert response data as interval data. The typical five or seven-item Likert response provides three response methods for each topic under study: a neutral item that is categorical, a two or three-item negatively worded ordinal scale, and a two or three-item positively worded ordinal scale. While Likert suggested scoring the five-item response with the numbers 1-5 and scoring the seven-item response with numbers 1-7, it places the neutral response in the 3rd or 4th position, which, if treating the data as interval means that 'neutral' scores higher than the Strongly Disagree-Disagree and lower than the Agree-Strongly Agree items, is not a logical outcome.