Best Likert Scale Types for Surveys – A Complete Guide

Comprehending various Likert Scale types can enhance your ability to collect more precise and meaningful data, ultimately leading to improved survey results and a higher response rate.

Selecting the appropriate type of Likert Scale for your business can facilitate the extraction of actionable insights from survey data efficiently.

In this blog, you’ll learn:

Table of Contents:

1. What is a Likert Scale Type?
2. When to Use a Specific Likert Scale Type?
3. Types of Likert Scale Based on Response Type
4. Best Types of Likert Scale Based on Number of Responses
5. How to Visualize Different Likert Scale Types?
6. Characteristics of Likert Scale Types
7. Wrap Up

Before delving right into the blog’s core theme, we’ll address the following question: What is a Likert Scale and its types?

What is a Likert Scale Type?

Likert Scale is a psychometric (test designed to show someone’s personality, opinions, etc.) scale that can help you understand the views and perspectives of the market towards your brand. The Likert Scale comes in different variants to help your business personalize its communication, among other benefits.

Besides, it measures the qualitative data (opinions and sentiments) by categorically assigning value. In other words, responses are measured based on their disagreement or agreement level.

The Likert Scale is based on the rationale that the strength and intensity of the respondents’ answers are linear. More so, they can be measured on a scale ranging from a complete agreement to a complete disagreement. You can use a wide variety of topics (general and specific questions) to probe respondents about their level of agreement, perceptions, or beliefs toward your brand.

In 1932, Rensis Likert, a psychologist interested in measuring people’s opinions or attitudes on a variety of items, developed the original Likert Scale.

The difference between a proper scale and a Likert Scale type is that the latter distinguishes between the underlying phenomenon and the means by which the variation is captured.

Also, it assumes that the distance between each choice/option is equal.

In the next section, we’ll cover the following: when to use a Likert Scale.

When to Use a Specific Likert Scale Type?

You’ll agree when we say measuring and analyzing the quality of products or services using the market perspective is increasingly becoming a norm.

The Likert Scale types (which we’ll cover later on) are increasingly helping businesses like yours understand their niche markets in-depth. Essentially, you can use a scale to analyze responses (opinions, beliefs, and sentiments) from a just-concluded survey exercise.

Besides, you can empower your potential customers to decide how your products and services can best serve their needs.

How?

You can achieve the aforementioned by having them provide their honest opinion (data) about the critical issues they feel you should address, such as the quality of a product/service, customer service, price, etc.

We recommend you try all the key Likert Scale types and note differences in insights.

Wait, there’s more!

You can use the Likert Scale to visualize different types of raw survey data using a variety of scales, namely: nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio.

Keep reading because, in the coming section, we’ll address the key types of the Likert Scale and how you can use them.

Types of Likert Scale Based on Response Type:

Here are some of the types of Likert Scale based on the response.

• Type 1: Likert Scale for Satisfaction

  • Very satisfied
  • Satisfied
  • Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied
  • Dissatisfied
  • Very dissatisfied

• Type 2: Likert Scale for Frequency

  • Never
  • Rarely
  • Sometimes
  • Often
  • Very often

• Type 3: Likert Scale for Likelihood

  • Extremely likely
  • Very likely
  • Somewhat likely
  • Neither likely nor unlikely
  • Somewhat unlikely
  • Very unlikely
  • Extremely unlikely

• Type 4: Likert Scale for Agreement

  • Strongly agree
  • Agree
  • Somewhat agree
  • Neither agree nor disagree
  • Somewhat disagree
  • Disagree
  • Strongly disagree

Best Types of Likert Scale Based on Number of Responses

The Likert Scale is increasingly becoming a must-have tool for businesses like yours when it comes to collecting critical insights, such as customer satisfaction or employee experience.

There are two major types of Likert Scale that further have 5 categories each, which are as follows

1. Even Likert Scale
2. Odd Likert Scale

1. Even Likert Scale Types

Researchers use even Likert scales to collect extreme feedback without providing a neutral option.

• 2-point Likert Scale

The 2-point Likert Scale type is one of the simplest scales you can work with. It’s made up of questions with two choices.

• 4-point Likert Scale

A 4-point Likert Scale is made of questions providing respondents with 4 choices. You’re likely to get 4 varying opinions of the same question.

• 6-point Likert Scale

A 6-point Likert Scale is made of questions providing respondents with 6 choices, as shown above. You’re likely to get 6 varying opinions of the same question.

This Likert Scale type displays extreme options for respondents. Besides, it comes without a neutral choice.

• 10-point Likert Scale

A 10-point Likert Scale is made of questions providing respondents with 10 choices, as shown above. Besides, it displays extreme options for the underlying question.

2. Odd Likert Scale Types

• 3-point Likert Scale

This scale chart has extreme ends and a neutral option (a gray area). It provides respondents with 3 options in a single question.

• 5-point Likert Scale

A 5-point Likert Scale is made of questions providing respondents with 5 choices, as shown above. Besides, it has a neutral option (a gray area).

• 7-point Likert Scale

The 7-point Likert Scale is an upgrade to the 5-point Scale. It offers 7 options in a single question. Also, it has a neutral option.

• 9-point Likert Scale

This Likert Scale type is an upgrade to the 7-Point Scale. It offers 9 options in a single question. Also, it has a neutral option.

In the coming section, we’ll address how to visualize different types of Likert Scale.

How to Visualize Different Likert Scale Types?

Google Sheets is a trusted data visualization tool because it’s familiar and has been there for years.

However, the spreadsheet application lacks ready-made Likert Scale types.

We understand switching tools is not an easy task.

Therefore, we’re not advocating you ditch this tool in favor of other expensive data visualization tools.

There’s an easy-to-use and amazingly affordable visualization tool that comes as an add-on you can easily install in your Google Sheets ready-made Likert Scale type. The tool is called ChartExpo.

So, what is ChartExpo?

ChartExpo is an incredibly intuitive add-on you can easily install in your spreadsheet tool without watching hours of YouTube tutorials.

With many ready-to-go visualizations, ChartExpo turns your complex, raw data into insightful charts that tell the data stories in real time.

• ChartExpo is cloud-hosted, which makes it extremely light. You have a 100% guarantee that your browser won’t be slowed down.
• You can export your insightful, easy-to-read, and intuitive charts in JPEG, PDF, SVG, and PNG format.
• ChartExpo add-on is only $10 a month after the end of the trial period.
• The easy-to-use app has an in-built library with a lot of different easy-to-customize and ready-made charts for your data stories.

This section will use a Likert Scale Chart to visualize the tabular data below.

Questions	Scale	Responses
How do you rate our cleaning staff behavior?	1	229
How do you rate our cleaning staff behavior?	2	76
How do you rate our cleaning staff behavior?	3	110
How do you rate our cleaning staff behavior?	4	50
How do you rate our cleaning staff behavior?	5	150
How do you rate our cleaning staff behavior?	6	167
How do you rate our cleaning staff behavior?	7	224
How do you rate our cleaning staff behavior?	8	170
How do you rate our cleaning staff behavior?	9	10
How do you rate our cleaning staff behavior?	10	147
How do you rate our cleaning services?	1	71
How do you rate our cleaning services?	2	73
How do you rate our cleaning services?	3	85
How do you rate our cleaning services?	4	238
How do you rate our cleaning services?	5	91
How do you rate our cleaning services?	6	152
How do you rate our cleaning services?	7	51
How do you rate our cleaning services?	8	18
How do you rate our cleaning services?	9	20
How do you rate our cleaning services?	10	148
Will you recommend our services in your circle?	1	233
Will you recommend our services in your circle?	2	46
Will you recommend our services in your circle?	3	144
Will you recommend our services in your circle?	4	246
Will you recommend our services in your circle?	5	129
Will you recommend our services in your circle?	6	126
Will you recommend our services in your circle?	7	234
Will you recommend our services in your circle?	8	228
Will you recommend our services in your circle?	9	182
Will you recommend our services in your circle?	10	190

To install the ChartExpo add-on for Google Sheets, click this link.

• Open the worksheet and click the Extensions
• Then click Charts, Graphs, & Visualizations by ChartExpo.
• Click the Open button in the dropdown.

• Click the Add New Chart button to access your fully stocked library of charts.

• Once ChartExpo is loaded, you will see a list of charts. Look for the “Likert Scale Chart”.

• Select the sheet holding your data and select the Metrics option. Fill in the numerical numbers (in our case, we’ll use responses).
• Select the Dimensions button and fill in the dimensional data (in our example, we’ll use questions and scale), as shown below.
• Finish the simple process by clicking the Create Chart button.

• To Change the Likert Scale type, click the Chart Settings button, as shown below.

• Once the Chart Settings Window shows, click the Scale Types.  Then, click the Select Scale button and select your preferred Likert Scale type.
• Click the Apply button to preserve the new changes.
• Check out the final 10-point Likert Scale Chart below.

Characteristics of Likert Scale Types

• Related Questions

Questions should be easily related to the sentence’s answers, regardless of whether the relationship between the item and sentence is evident.

• Scale type

Survey participants’ responses should always have two extreme positions and an intermediate option that serves as the bridge.

• The number of answer options

The more items on the Likert Scale, the higher the reliability of insights produced.

• Reliability of the scale

You can augment your chart to a seven-point Likert Scale by adding “very” to both extremes of a five-point chart. A larger scale improves the reliability of your results drastically.

• Lack of a neutral option

You can work with only even values by eliminating the “neutral” possibility in your Likert Scale types.

FAQs:

What is a Likert Scale?

A Likert Scale is a bi-polar scale you can use to collect the attitudes and opinions of your target market.

The psychometric scale can help you understand the target market’s views and perspectives towards your brand. The Likert Scales come in different variants, such as the 5-point, 6-point, etc.

Which Likert Scale is best?

There’s no one superior Likert Scale type. All the variants have a role to play depending on your needs.

If your goal is to provide a neutral option in your survey, use an Odd Likert Scale type. If your goal is to do away with neutral responses, use an Even Likert Scale type.

Wrap Up

Making sense of survey data is complex and time-consuming.

Why?

Survey data is complex and may involve both textual and numerical information. And this calls for a change in strategy, especially during the data visualization phase.

This is where specialized survey tools, such as the Likert Scale, come in. The Likert Scale is one of the many charts tailor-made specifically to help your business extract actionable insights from survey data without consuming much time.

There are two key types of Likert Scale, namely:

• Odd Likert Scale type
• Even Likert Scale type

Yes, you read that right.

Google Sheets lacks survey visualization charts with the Likert Scale.

You don’t have to ditch your tool in favor of other costly tools in the market.

So, what’s the solution?

We recommend you install third-party apps, such as ChartExpo, to access ready-to-use Likert Scale types.

ChartExpo is an add-on for Google Sheets that’s loaded with an insightful and ready-to-go Likert Scale. You don’t need programming or coding skills to use ChartExpo.

Sign up for a 7-day free trial today to access ready-made Likert Scale types that are easy to interpret and visually appealing to your target audience.