Likert Scale: Definitions, Examples, and Questions

What is it you want to find out? Let’s say you’ve noticed some people love online shopping, while others wouldn’t do it if their lives depended on it. And you want to quantify this.

So your task is to measure how people like shopping online

Remember: a Likert scale survey works best when you want to learn about something that can’t be understood with one question. That means you have to measure indicators—specific questions that help you understand the concept you’re trying to measure.

Take customer satisfaction. Likert scales are great for when you need to do a customer satisfaction survey because there are several characteristics that can influence the phenomenon: perceived quality, customer expectations, pricing, speed of service or delivery, and so on. Each of these are an indicator of customer satisfaction.

So what kinds of questions can you ask people to find out how much they enjoy buying things online?

You could start by asking them to list words they associate with online shopping: boring, complicated, easy, quick, intangible, and so on.

Build the indicator statements, or items, around this list.

1. I prefer to touch things before I buy them (Strongly Agree—Strongly Disagree)

2. The variety of options online overwhelms me (Strongly Agree—Strongly Disagree)

3. Checking out is easy online (Strongly Agree—Strongly Disagree)

It’s important that every statement gets at the heart of what you’re interested in understanding.

Here are a few more tips for writing your indicator statements:

Use positive and negative indicators for balance. A positively worded statement should have a negatively worded counterpart later in the questionnaire.

So if you have the statement, “The variety of options online overwhelms me,” then you should also have an item like, “I appreciate the wide selection online shopping has the offer.”

People who agree with the positive statements should disagree with the negative ones, and vice versa. That’s how you can be confident that your questions are clear, and the responses are reliable.

Follow best practices for creating survey questions. Cater to your audience, use their language, and avoid double-barreled or long, complicated statements.

Remember: how we phrase a question influences the response. So use neutral language, avoiding words like ‘love’, ‘hate’, ‘terrible’, ‘incredible’, and so on. Let people tell you the strength of their feelings instead of cueing it in the statements.

When it comes to the Likert-type response scales, you have to make two decisions.

First is the semantic scale. You want to choose options that are simple and unambiguous. Among the most common: Agree—Disagree, Helpful—Not Helpful, Excellent—Poor, Satisfied—Dissatisfied, Always—Never. But just because they’re popular doesn’t mean they are clear.

And make sure the differences between the categories are valid and useful. Let’s say you want to measure how often a person gets up from their desk at work. You choose Never—Seldom—Sometimes—Often—Always. How do you quantify the difference between seldom and sometimes?

If a scale is potentially ambiguous, either explain the meanings in your introduction or change the scale. Don’t use ‘Sometimes’ when you really mean ‘Once a week.’

Second is the number of response choices. Likert-type responses often have an odd number, so respondents have a neutral option. The jury is still out on whether that is necessary or even desirable.

Most researchers agree that, at minimum, you should use a 5-point Likert scale survey. But other research shows that the more choices there are, the less often respondents use the middle or neutral category. What seems clear is that a 7-point Likert scale approaches the upper limits of reliability—so adding more options is likely to give you worse, not better, data.

Think about those HappyOrNot terminals you find in airports, shopping malls, and even in toilets. You know, the ones with the happy and angry faces on them? Most of them use an even number of response choices. Why? Because it forces people to choose a side, making it easier to collapse responses into two categories (positive vs. negative experience).

Which you choose depends on how you plan to evaluate the responses.

Here are a few more tips for creating your Likert scale responses:

Be creative! Just because you’re collecting data doesn’t mean you need to sound like a robot. Survey tools like Typeform let you edit the labels, so your brand voice can shine through your questions. Try out Interesting—Not Interesting, or even No Way—Meh—Totally! to keep people engaged.

Use unipolar responses. The aim of a Likert scale is to get at a larger concept with a series of questions. Don’t name that concept with polar opposites like Safe—Dangerous or Strong—Weak. Instead, measure in degrees: Very Safe—Not Safe and Very Strong—Not at All Strong. They’re just easier for people to understand, and you can be sure that one extreme is the exact opposite of the other.

Stay consistent with your scales. Creating a Likert scale involves summing or averaging the responses to measure a concept or phenomenon. Without consistent scales, you can’t be certain you are measuring the same thing with each statement.

Surveys are an iterative process. The key to successful research is testing, analyzing, revising, and improving the way you collect data.

Test your survey on a small pool of participants that represent the larger group you’re trying to learn more about and analyze the data. If you’re going for extra credit, you can conduct an item analysis.

An item analysis helps you find out which items, or statements, are most useful and which are problematic. The math’s a bit tricky (which is why I defected from psychology), but a statistical analysis tool can help you find the correlations between your questions.

Once you’ve started conducting the survey, run another item analysis to ensure the scale is consistent.