Steve Tippins warns researchers against treating Likert scale responses as precise measurements. A mean of 4.172 from 1-5 agreement scales falsely suggests accuracy that doesn't exist. The numbers are coded categories, not continuous data.
Many times people are using Likert scales, strongly disagree to strongly agree, and it can be a 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 or something like that. And then they take these answers of all the 700 or 200 or whatever number of participants there were, and they come up with an average saying, oh, it's 4.172. Well, nobody was allowed to give an answer other than a 4 or a 5 or a 3 or a 2 or a 1. But that 4.172 implies that there's a lot of accuracy in the data, and you were just taking strongly agrees and turning them into numbers. So you have to be aware of this when you're making claims about what you're reporting. Drop the word help in the comments and I'll send you the link for my free dissertation help community.
