ABSTRACT
Public opinion surveys often ask respondents to place themselves and political parties, candidates, and public figures on issue scales. Some issue scales have labeled endpoints such as “strongly agree” and “strongly disagree.” These are also known as Likert-type questions or items. Likert-type items provide a prompt and a gradated, symmetric scale for respondents to register their opinion. A Likert scale, on the other hand, is a simple scaling method in which the responses to several items are added together to create a summated scale (Likert, 1932).
