What is a Likert Scale?

07.10.24 01:42 PM - By Max

A Likert scale is a popular rating system used in surveys and questionnaires to measure people's attitudes, opinions, or feelings. It offers respondents a range of options, often five or seven points, to express the extent of their agreement or disagreement with a statement. For example, options may range from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree," providing a nuanced way to capture opinions beyond simple yes/no answers. This makes the Likert scale an effective tool for researchers to assess how strongly individuals feel about specific topics – if you’re managing a business and need to know how to tailor your services towards your clients and customers, a survey employing the Likert scale may help.

The Benefits of Using a Likert Scale

The Likert scale is highly useful in situations where understanding degrees of opinion is important. For instance, businesses can use it to gather feedback on product features or customer satisfaction, offering insights into customer preferences. The sheer range it offers helps to uncover subtle differences in responses, providing a more accurate and representative picture of feedback compared to binary ‘yes or no’ questions.


By allowing participants to choose from a range of responses, the scale enables deeper insights into opinions, whether it's assessing how satisfied employees are in their jobs or gauging customer preferences in product development.

Limitations of the Likert Scale

While the five-point Likert scale (strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree) is widely used due to its simplicity, it has some limitations. As an example, one of its weaknesses is that it may not always capture the full range of respondents' feelings, potentially restricting the accuracy of their responses. Some people may feel their opinions fall between the available options, and the simplicity of the scale can sometimes fail to communicate the complexity of their views. Moreover, the results might lack objectivity, as individuals may be influenced by external factors, such as social desirability, when responding. This is why some businesses and researchers provide a section for respondents to expand on their answers.



Likert scales are a valuable tool for businesses and researchers looking to gather detailed, actionable insights. They help organisations understand customer views on product features, employee satisfaction, or public perceptions. The flexibility in the scale's design allows respondents to express opinions in degrees, providing more detailed data that leads to better decision-making. Unlike simple ‘yes or no’ questions, the Likert scale uncovers varying levels of agreement, enabling a more comprehensive analysis of opinions that provide more nuanced data. In running a business, it can be hard to know what to change and how to implement it, which is why setting up automatic surveys for your customers can work wonders. If you make a sale and a customer provides you with an email address, you may want to attach a survey to an email receipt, or ask them to scan a code that will take them to the survey if they purchase or visit in person. Partnering with Digital Scientists is a great way to integrate these systems into your sales processes; our business systems branch streamlines operations for business success - like surveys that ping to customers when they make a purchase, which saves you from having to manually hand out surveys to everyone after the fact, contributing to smoother automated workflows.

Max