An essential part of research is to gauge the respondent’s opinions effectively. The opinions could be about a product, a phenomenon, or any event that happened in the recent past. Using a survey as a tool and employing the Likert scale analysis techniques specifically enables you to gauge those responses and extract information about the research subject. Many wonder how a Likert scale can do this. Well, those who wonder are unaware of the importance of this scale.
Therefore, keeping this in mind, today’s article is all about highlighting the importance of the Likert scale analysis in dissertation research. There will be a description of this scale. Along with this, in today’s article, we will see how you can analyse the data collected through this scale. So, let’s start the discussion by defining it first.
What Is A Likert Scale And Likert Scale Analysis?
A Likert scale is a type of scale that is unidimensional in nature and helps you collect the respondents’ opinions and behaviours about the subject matter being studied. It is also called a psychometric scale used to understand the views of the research participants about something. This scale consists of a question that often has a 5-point or 7-point answer. The choices of answers range from strongly agree to strongly disagree, with neutral being the middle option. This very useful scale was developed by social psychologist Rensis Likert in 1932.
As far as the definition of Likert scale analysis is concerned, it is linked to the definition of the Likert scale itself. This is an analysis run by the researchers to understand the information they have collected through this technique. By doing this analysis, the researcher comprehends the patterns of opinions that respondents possess about the subject. Hence, this is all about the Likert scale.
What Is An Example Of The Likert Scale?
The information given above about the Likert scale must have strengthened your theoretical base about this scale. However, to make things concrete practically, there is a need to discuss the example of the Likert scale. Hence, an example is as follows:
Question: This product from Amazon was a good purchase:
- Strongly agree
- Agree
- Neither agreed nor disagreed/Neutral
- Disagree
- Strongly disagree
What Is The Importance Of Likert Scale Analysis?
After discussing the definition and examples of the Likert scale analysis, let’s now move forward to its importance. This analysis is important because of multiple reasons. A brief description of the main reasons is as follows:
- As a Likert scale asks the questions in an ordered form, the analysis of the information gathered through this scale is also easy.
- This analysis gives an accurate or close-to-reality measurement of the attitude of the respondents. It tells about the extent to which the respondents agree or disagree with the question asked.
- Another point that makes it important is that it measures the attitudes and opinions quantitatively, although the options seem to be qualitative.
- Likert scale analysis also allows the researcher to measure the frequency of something with which it happens. It can also explain the likelihood of happening the same if you go further deep into the analysis.
- This analysis is a universal method, and everyone in the world understands this scale. Hence, this easiness of the scale makes it more important.
So, these are the points that make the Likert scale analysis very important in dissertation research. If you still have any confusion about this analysis, you can buy dissertation online UK as a sample and see how other researchers have done it.
Best Practices to Follow
The information gathered through the use of the Likert scale is discrete and limited in scope. Due to this, there has been a long-standing dispute between the researchers over the best practices for analysing the Likert scale information. So, depending on the type of information collected with the use of this scale, the two best practices are as follows:
- Parametric Tests. This test is most useful for Likert scale information, which is continuous and follows a normal distribution. This test assumes that there is no break in the data. The 2-sample t-test is a parametric test used mostly for the Likert scale analysis.
- Non-parametric tests. The second type of test that you can use for the Likert scale analysis is a non-parametric test. These tests give more accurate results with ordinal data and do not assume a normal distribution of the data. The Mann-Whitney test is an example of a non-parametric test.
Conclusion
Conclusively, the Likert scale is a comprehensive technique for measuring the respondents’ opinions and attitudes toward something. The results of the Likert scale analysis help the researcher a lot in understanding the true opinions of the respondent. 2 sample t-test and Mann-Whitney are the two tests used to analyse the information gathered by the Likert scale. So, read about these tests first and then analyse the information.
