Analyzing and interpreting data from likert-type scales.

By Gail M Sullivan, Anthony R. Artino Jr.. Journal of Graduate Medical Education, 2013

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Developing questionnaires for educational research: AMEE Guide No. 87 (2014, methodology): “When attempting to assess hard-to-measure educational constructs such as motivation, confidence and satisfaction, it usually makes sense to create a composite score for each survey scale than it does to use individual survey items as variables (Sullivan & Artino 2013).”
The use of rating and Likert scales in Natural Language Generation human evaluation tasks: A review and some recommendations (2019, methodology): “In particular, it can be controversial whether rating and Likert scales should be considered as ordinal or interval scales; see for example Knapp (1990), Jamieson (2004), Pell (2005), Cariﬁo et al. (2008), Norman (2010) and Sullivan and Artino (2013).”
Comparing Two Samples from an Individual Likert Question (2017, methodology): “For two independent samples, whether the correct approach for analysis should be a parametric t-test or the non-parametric Mann-Whitney test is much debated in the literature (Sullivan and Artino, 2013).”
A sense of belonging at university: student retention, motivation and enjoyment (2021, methodology): “Ordinal data has been found to be a valid and reliable approximation of a continuous variable when there are five or more levels included (Johnson and Creech 1983; Norman 2010; Sullivan and Artino 2013; Zumbo and Zimmerman 1993), such as the 5-point Likert scale used above.”