A five-point Likert scale with categories from strongly disagree to strongly agree best describes which level of measurement?

A five-point Likert scale with categories from strongly disagree to strongly agree best describes which level of measurement?

• A. Nominal
• B. Ordinal
• C. Interval
• D. Ratio

Answer: (B)

A five-point Likert scale captures an ordered sense of agreement, so it provides data that are ordinal. You can say one response indicates more agreement than another, but you can’t assume the steps between options are numerically equal. That makes it different from interval data (which requires equal distances between points) and ratio data (which also has a true zero). Nominal data have no inherent order at all, so they don’t fit either. In practice, a single Likert item is best described as ordinal, though sums of multiple items are sometimes treated as approximate interval data for analysis.

A five-point Likert scale captures an ordered sense of agreement, so it provides data that are ordinal. You can say one response indicates more agreement than another, but you can’t assume the steps between options are numerically equal. That makes it different from interval data (which requires equal distances between points) and ratio data (which also has a true zero). Nominal data have no inherent order at all, so they don’t fit either. In practice, a single Likert item is best described as ordinal, though sums of multiple items are sometimes treated as approximate interval data for analysis.