Conferences

The well-known survey instrument created by the psychologist Rensis Likert ( “Likert Scale”), is still now widely used in social research (in ESS questionnaire we can find various sets of Likert scale). However, this useful instrument has stimulated a great debate centred on the following question: are the category labels perceived as equidistant by respondents? The distance between “agree” and “neither agree or disagree” is not always the same between “1” and “2”, but usually researchers assign cardinal values to the verbal response options .
One of the answers is that differences in perceiving labels’ meaning (and consequently distance between labels) could be related to respondents’ social, cultural and linguistic context. The aim of this work is to estimate differences in perceiving distances between the various Likert’s labels according to countries and native languages by using ESS data. In this perspective, ESS Likert items have been analysed through a particular analytical approach, Multi Dimensional Scaling.