By ChartExpo Content Team
Embarking on the journey of effective data collection and feedback analysis, the spotlight turns to the invaluable insights offered by “Rating Scale Examples”.
When conducting a survey, respondents may need to rate their opinion or degree of satisfaction with a particular product or service. To perform this objectively, you’ve got to use different rating scale queries in your survey.
With rating scale examples, you can easily quantify your audience’s feelings and opinions in terms of specified values in numbers.
A rating scale is one of the proven question types for online and offline surveys. Your audience can use the scale to rate an attribute or feature of your service or product.
Let’s assume you’ve used rating scale examples to gather data for further analysis.
How do you extract answers from the data?
This is where charts with rating scales, such as Likert, come in. A Likert Scale Chart has choices ranging from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’ to help you get a bird’s eye view of your audience’s opinions and level of agreement.
Also, it’s straightforward to read and interpret a Likert scale chart, as you will see later.
Definition: A Rating Scale is a form of closed-ended survey question you can use to capture responses in numerical form.
For instance, it could be survey questions asking your target audience to rate your service or product.
How would you rate our products or services on a scale of 1 (worst) to 5 (excellent)?
Rating scale examples are mostly made up of multiple-choice questions to gather in-depth responses for further analysis.
Use a rating scale to associate a qualitative measure with a product’s key aspects. Some of the areas in a rating scale that come in handy include evaluating the performance of:
We can use the rating scale as a Performance Rating Scale and present the credit score rating.
In the coming section, we’ll take you through types of rating scales.
Let’s dive in.
We have 4 primary types of rating scales you can use to put together a survey.
Let’s check them out.
A graphic rating scale uses a visual representation of the response options. Respondents select a point on the scale that best reflects their opinion.
A common graphic rating scale is the Likert scale.
Here is an example of a graphic rating scale question:
“How satisfied are you with the quality of the food?”
The response options are displayed as a bar with the numbers 1 to 5. Respondents select the point on the bar that best reflects their opinion.
A numerical rating scale employs numbers as replies. Respondents choose the number that best represents their point of view.
Here is a numerical rating scale question example:
“How satisfied are you with the quality of our customer service?”
The response options range from 1 to 5. 1 being “Extremely dissatisfied” and 5 being “Extremely satisfied.”
The respondents pick the number best representing their opinion.
In a descriptive rating scale, respondents are provided with an option to elaborate on their responses, which can be particularly useful in Descriptive Analytics to gain deeper insights.
For instance, how would you rate our services?
We have used the 5-point performance rating scale in the above example.
As the name suggests, a comparative rating scale provides your target audience with an option to answer a survey question by comparing one attribute against another.
Here are some reasons why incorporating a rating scale:
Rating scales are easy to understand and interpret. This makes them an ideal choice for collecting feedback from customers.
Furthermore, they consist of questions with answers that customers can choose from. You can pose the questions differently to customize the scale to your needs.
Rating scales are immensely helpful for eliciting opinions from big crowds. The respondents assign a score to a statement or question.
It takes minimal response time, making it a time-efficient feedback collection method.
Validity is the degree to which a rating scale accurately measures the respective metric.
Rating scales allow respondents to communicate their thoughts and feelings more precisely than a simple yes/no answer. This gives you more insight into what people are feeling and thinking.
In the coming section, we’ll provide rating scale examples to get you started as quickly as possible.
Here are different rating scale examples:
In the ensuing section, we’ll show you how to visualize and examine rating scale data.
You don’t want to miss this.
Excel is a spreadsheet application you can use to organize, store, and visualize data using charts and graphs.
You’re unlikely to find advanced charts in Excel with rating scales, such as the Likert Scale Chart. We’re not advocating you leave this tool. Install a particular third-party add-in in your spreadsheet application to create charts with rating scales.
The application is called ChartExpo.
What is ChartExpo?
ChartExpo is an add-in you can easily install in your spreadsheet application to access charts with rating scales.
ChartExpo is inexpensive. You’ll only spend $10 every month. Besides, you’re free to cancel your subscription anytime.
Also, you don’t need coding skills to create rating scale charts for your stories.
Let’s learn how to install ChartExpo.
ChartExpo charts are available both in Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel. Please use the following CTA’s to install the tool of your choice and create beautiful visualizations in a few clicks in your favorite tool.
The Likert Scale Chart is used for survey feedback analysis to measure people’s opinions, attitudes, or behaviors. This allows researchers to easily visualize and understand the results of their survey by quantifying intangible feelings and attitudes.
Let’s analyze the rating scale examples data using the Likert Scale Chart.
Questions | Scales | Responses |
How well does our product meet your needs? | 1 | 130 |
How well does our product meet your needs? | 2 | 136 |
How well does our product meet your needs? | 3 | 128 |
How well does our product meet your needs? | 4 | 968 |
How well does our product meet your needs? | 5 | 638 |
How satisfied are you with our team in resolving your issue? | 1 | 186 |
How satisfied are you with our team in resolving your issue? | 2 | 278 |
How satisfied are you with our team in resolving your issue? | 3 | 483 |
How satisfied are you with our team in resolving your issue? | 4 | 539 |
How satisfied are you with our team in resolving your issue? | 5 | 514 |
How satisfied are you with your in-store experience? | 1 | 148 |
How satisfied are you with your in-store experience? | 2 | 130 |
How satisfied are you with your in-store experience? | 3 | 193 |
How satisfied are you with your in-store experience? | 4 | 665 |
How satisfied are you with your in-store experience? | 5 | 864 |
How satisfied are you with product packing? | 1 | 145 |
How satisfied are you with product packing? | 2 | 240 |
How satisfied are you with product packing? | 3 | 104 |
How satisfied are you with product packing? | 4 | 667 |
How satisfied are you with product packing? | 5 | 844 |
In this section, we’ll cover the best practices that survey gurus use to create a goal-driven survey.
Probably the critical part of a rating scale survey is creating questions that accurately measure:
You’re likely to gather distorted and unreliable data if you have a shaky foundation of ambiguous or biased questions.
We recommend you keep many elements in mind when drafting survey questions.
Consider the wording of your rating scale, as it closely relates to the data you’re collecting.
Secondly, be mindful of your target respondents and how to best engage them.
Crafting a rating scale is an art, and requires elements of psychology, writing skills, and marketing expertise.
Gathering accurate responses involves writing good questions and organizing them to form a goal-driven survey.
Creating rating scale example questions is a multistage process that requires attention to multiple details. Furthermore, this process can be complicated because a survey can be applied in multiple areas of your business.
Different rating scale surveys come with varying degrees of detail. More so, questions can be asked in different ways. Also, questions asked earlier in a survey may influence how your audience responds to other questions.
To enhance your survey’s effectiveness, consider conducting pilot tests or focus groups during the early stages of developing rating scale examples. This proactive approach ensures your survey instrument aligns seamlessly with the objectives of your research or data collection effort.
Why?
To better understand how your target audience will perceive or understand your questionnaire. Pretesting a survey is critical in optimizing the process to increase participation and completion rates.
We’ve put together more tips you can use to create goal-focused product survey questions.
Crafting concise and easily understandable rating scale examples is crucial. In other words, steer clear of double negatives or ambiguous wording to ensure clarity and precision in the questions posed to respondents. For instance, avoid asking:
“Do you agree our new product line is not unhelpful?”
These question types may mislead your target respondents. Your language should also be appropriate to improve readability.
Craft questions with an average seventh-grade reading level to ensure everyone can understand. Issues such as ambiguity and jargon can confuse or alienate your audience.
We recommend you avoid putting an opinion or something that reflects your sentiments in your online survey questionnaires.
Look at the example below.
This question seems to pass an opinion you want your target audience to agree with.
Such rating scale examples will distort the resulting insights.
Create neutral and objective questions.
We recommend you use questions that are balanced and neutral.
Remember, people need a balanced questionnaire to provide honest and objective responses.
Look at the examples below.
How balanced are these rating scale example questions?
Notice there’s no opportunity for respondents to express their disappointments using words such as angry and sad.
Goal-focused questions use an objective tone.
Notice the difference after adding negative choices for balance.
Each rating scale example question should give room for one answer.
Anything more than this can confuse your respondents. Confusing respondents is unethical and may distort your overall findings.
Why?
Your target audience may choose an answer that doesn’t reflect their true feelings.
Check out an example of a double-barreled question below.
“How would you rate our new course and our main trainer?
What’s the problem with the question above?
The new course and the trainer are two distinct themes. Squeezing two varying themes in the same question can push your audience to either address one or skip the question.
We recommend you break these question types into two for comprehensive and in-depth responses.
For instance:
This approach can help you uncover critical areas you’re failing.
Ask more closed-ended questions in your survey.
Why?
To gather analyzable data, use closed-ended questions.
This is because a rating scale generates quantitative data you can analyze using charts and graphs, such as a Likert Scale Chart.
Besides, the resulting answers are always objective and conclusive.
Conversely, open-ended questions generate qualitative responses. This data type is frustrating and requires more effort and time to analyze compared to closed-ended questions.
Experiments show that open-ended questions have a lower completion rate.
So, if your goal is to save time and energy, consider using close-ended questions.
We recommend you ensure your rating scale is in a language your target audience can understand.
For example, if you engage respondents of Hispanic heritage, use translated questions to clarify everything. Also, engage Hispanics during the pretesting to iron out the ambiguity in your rating scale.
So, what are the benefits of rating scale examples in your survey?
Check out the benefits of a rating scale below.
Other data collection tools, such as interviews, are often prone to manipulation and distortion.
For instance, respondents may not want to share their true feelings with a stranger. Besides, social pressure to conform can easily distort the final data.
How?
Experiments have shown that we tend to agree with a more dominant person in a room.
Yes, even if we know the answer is wrong.
Survey rating scale examples can help you overcome this obstacle. Your respondents will fill out the surveys privately, without peer pressure.
The responses gathered will be more honest and reliable. In other words, they will be true representations of the actual sentiments of your target market.
A survey rating scale can help you to do more than collect information about past customers.
To uncover a potential customer base, you can use rating scale examples in other scopes, such as market research as well as IELTS band score.
How can you do this?
Well-crafted rating scale can help you ask qualifying questions that narrow the audience to hot leads.
For instance, you can target people with a high disposable income by using questions that probe income brackets.
One of the key merits of a rating scale is that you can use it to question your audience over a protracted time.
Besides, there are freemium survey creation tools, such as Google and Microsoft Forms, for creating rating scale example questions and gathering data.
The longer you gather data, the more you’ll have for analysis. More data means a higher degree of reliability of the resulting insights.
While convenient and commonly used, rating scales possess certain limitations for data collection and analysis:
Rating scales often provide a limited level of precision in capturing nuanced opinions or attitudes. Respondents might find it challenging to express subtle differences between their sentiments, leading to a loss of detailed information.
The interpretation of scale points can vary among respondents. Variations in individual perspectives and experiences can lead to different interpretations of the same rating on a scale. This subjectivity can introduce inconsistency in the collected data.
People taking surveys might choose “safe” answers in the middle, instead of saying how they feel. This can make the data misleading, as it doesn’t show the full picture of opinions or experiences.
Rating scales often lack context, making it challenging to understand the reasons behind a particular rating. Without additional qualitative data, it may be difficult to uncover the root causes of certain ratings.
The cultural background and language proficiency of respondents can influence their understanding of rating scale items. This introduces potential bias, especially in surveys with a diverse participant pool.
A rating scale is a form of closed-ended survey question you can use to capture responses in numerical form.
For instance, on a scale of 1 (worst) to 5 (excellent), how would you rate our products or services?
Rating scale examples are mostly made up of multiple-choice questions to gather in-depth responses.
One of the key merits of rating scales is that you can use them to question your audience over a protracted time.
Besides, there are freemium survey creation tools, such as Google Forms and Microsoft Forms, that make everything easier in creating surveys.
When carrying out a survey exercise, your respondents may need to rate their knowledge or degree of satisfaction with a particular product or service.
To perform this objectively, you’ve got to use different rating scale examples in the survey.
Let’s assume you’ve used rating scale examples to gather data for further analysis.
How do you extract answers from the data?
This is where charts with rating scales, such as Likert Scale Chart, come in.
Microsoft Excel lacks charts with rating scales, such as a Likert Scale Chart.
So, what’s the solution?
We recommend you install an add-in, such as ChartExpo, to access the Likert Scale Chart and other rating scale example charts.
ChartExpo is an Excel add-in loaded with rating scale visualizations, such as the Likert Scale Chart.
Sign up for a 7-day free trial today to access ready-made graphs for visualizing rating scale responses.