Likert Scale Data: Use of Descriptive Statistics

In this article, the intent is to critique upon some descriptive statistics, especially, mean and standard deviation that have been used to descriptively analyze a Likert Scale data, and to specify and highlight some statistical measures that can be used as alternative measures. As the Likert scale data is, basically, not an interval or a ratio scale data, the statistical assumptions are violated when a social science researcher uses the mean and standard deviation to describe characteristics of the data. Avoiding the misuse of mean and standard deviation in social science research, the researcher can use other non-parametric measures like frequency, percentage, median, mode, range etc. that accounts the ranks or frequency of the scale values. Especially, the frequency percentage is highlighted to use as an effective statistical descriptor in social science research that provides the results about the degree of attitude and its intensity towards any phenomena measured by Likert scale.