Likert-scale for measurement of attitudes

Different people has different feelings. The thinking and behavior towards certain things are varying from people to people. These feelings are commonly referred attitude. In social science, various  research are conducted to know people attitude  towards certain things. In social science studies, it is necessary for measuring attitudes of the people towards certain things. Generally for this attitudes, scale is construct in such a way that the scores of the individual responses assign him a place on a scale. Under this approach, the respondent expresses agreement or disagreement with a number of statements relevant to the issue.

There are three major types of attitude scales: summated rating scale (Likert-scale), equal-appearing interval scales (thurstone scale), and a cumulative scale (Guttman scale).

Likert scale consists of number of statements which express either a favorable or unfavorable attitude towards the given object to which the respondent is asked or react. The respondent reacts in terms of statement given in the scale. Response of the respondents lies between the two extreme statements. The purpose of the Likert-scale is to pace an individual somewhere on an agreement continuum of the attitude in question. Each response on the Likert scale is given a numerical value or score and the scores are totaled to measure, the respondent's attitude.

Likert-scale is easy to construct and takes less time to construct. It is considered more reliable than the other scale. By using Likert-scale, investigator can study how responses differ between people and how responses differ between stimuli. Likert-scale has some limitations too. In spite of all the limitations, this Likert-scale is widely used in social science research studies to measure attitudes.