

One way to reduce social desirability bias is by allowing anonymity on self-administered surveys. For example, in taboo questions involving sex, illegal drugs, or racism, respondents may heighten “good behavior” or depress “bad” or undesirable behavior of their responses. Social desirability is the bias exhibited by people to present themselves in a positive light in the community. Nevertheless, a Likert scale may be compromised because of “social desirability”. Since respondents are not limited to a yes/no answer, a Likert scale allows researchers to obtain quantitative data that can be easily analyzed. However, a Likert scale should only be used when the question items are related to each other and can be presented in a degree-scale form. Likert scale is useful in measuring the general feeling or opinion of a particular topic, product, services or experience, and collecting additional data on the factors that contribute to those feelings or opinions. How satisfied are you with our customer support? The employee training provided the knowledge I need to do my work efficiently. Since adding more levels produces diverse valuations, a 5 or 7 level scale is most often ideal for avoiding extreme options by obtaining just a bit of variation.īelow are some examples of Likert scale questions and answers: Many researchers use five levels, but some also use 4, 7, 9, and even 10-leveled items.

People are given five to seven choices, or even nine balanced responses, that often come with a neutral point.Ī Likert scale does not have a fixed number of leveled items. These linear scales measure points of agreement/disagreement. The scale deems that the strength/intensity of the experience is linear.

Fixed choice response formats are used to determine how people feel about the topic, products, services, or experience. The Likert scale is one of the most popular rating scales developed to measure one’s attitudes or opinions. Please read our blog post to learn what is a Likert scale and how to create one for your next survey. Are you interested in finding out what you can use to measure questions that are neither agreed nor disagreed? A Likert scale can help you measure attitudes and opinions with a greater degree of nuance than simple binary questions, which offer only two answer options.
