Likert Scales are Ordinal

[engelhardtlm1]

One of my pet peeves since I've started teaching: there's a strong tendency for academia to treat Likert (pronounced "lick-ert", I just found out) scales as interval when they are ordinal. This leads people to do stupid things with them, reaching invalid conclusions.

Comments

[ladyarkham]

We talk about Likert scales often here, and I've never heard it pronounced "lick-ert," just "like-ert" with a long "i."

[engelhardtlm1]

Yeah, I had heard it the same way until I checked out the Wikipedia entry today. Wikipedia suggests that Likert might have the honor of having his name mispronounced more often than anyone else - as he pronounced it with a short "i", but everyone else makes it a long "i".

Even now, I have a hard time forcing myself to think in the short "i".