Likert scales are one of the most commonly used survey question types – especially in marketing, customer satisfaction, and opinion surveys.
They are used to understand people’s opinions and attitudes to a topic or subject matter. The most common Likert scale asks a respondent to select an option from a five (or seven) point scale which indicates how much they agree or disagree with a given statement – but there are endless other ways this same type can be applied.
Tableau also allows you to visualise the results of Likert questions in some cool ways – and that’s what we’ll be exploring today.
For a recent Viz challenge, I was asked to look at some data on on World Bank FMIS Project Outcomes (you can find out what that means here if you like). Surprisingly, there was some data within it that was stored on a Likert scale – see the section of the below viz that utilises a scale of 1 – 6.
Click to view on Tableau Public
The chart type above it called a ‘Diverging Likert Chart’, and differs from standard Likert graphs in that it splits responses cleanly by positive and negative responses types across all questions – allowing for easy analysis. If you’re going to be working with customer data, it’s a good one to know how to put together.
Thankfully, Art of Visualization has put together this great YouTube tutorial on building them that explains the different steps clearly – check it out below.
