Wednesday, March 30, 2016

How to check Likert scale summaries for plausibility

Suppose you are reading a paper that uses Likert scale responses. The paper reports the mean, standard deviation, and number of responses. If we are -- for some reason -- suspicious of a paper, we might ask, "Are these summary statistics possible for this number of responses, for this Likert scale?" Someone asked me this recently, so I wrote some simple code to help check. In this blog post, I outline how the code works.