612 – Visualizing Complex Models
Design of Plots for Likert and Other Rating Scales
Richard Heiberger
Temple University
Naomi B. Robbins
NBR
Rating scales, such as Likert scales and semantic differential scales, are very common in marketing research, customer satisfaction studies, psychometrics, opinion surveys, population studies, and numerous other fields. We recommend diverging stacked bar charts as the primary graphical display technique for Likert and related scales. We discuss the perceptual and programming issues in constructing the graphs. Many examples of plots of Likert scales are given. We present a package containing code in R, and a dashboard in Tableau, for diverging stacked bar charts. The graphical presentation of Likert scale data in R can be used from the command line, from the Rcmdr menu, and from an Excel Workbook using the RExcel interface.