Getting weighted averages with the Likert question

In today’s post, we’ll explore how to capture data using the Likert question type and how the weighted average calculation works.

First, let’s get started by creating a survey.

Drag a Matrix/Likert question type into your survey. You can also click on the icon once, and a new Matrix/Likert question type will appear at the bottom of your list of questions:

At ACME Co., we want to get some customer feedback on our portable hole. We devised a Likert question to ask participants to rate the portable hole on five aspects: Size, Price, Reliability, Portability, and Durability. We’ve used a typical five-point Likert rating scale for the question. We’ve asked participants to rate whether or not they were very unsatisfied, unsatisfied, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, satisfied, or very satisfied with each quality we want to collect feedback on. We’ve left the default Likert weighting scale intact, though you can enter your own weightings as you see fit:

Checking the results, here’s what we see. Not shown here is an important fact: we’ve got 11 total responses to our survey so far:

Note that Size’s weighted average score is 3.36. Here’s how we arrive at that score:

(Number of votes * Weighting for column 1) + (Number of votes * Weighting for column 2) + Number of votes * Weighting for Column 3) + (Number of votes * Weighting for column 4) + (Number of votes * Weighting for column 5) / Total Number of Votes

Here’s the equation for Size:

(2 * 1) + (1 * 2) + (2 * 3) + (3 * 4) + (3 * 5) / 11

2 + 2 + 6 + 12 + 15 / 11

37 / 11 = 3.36

Overall, we can see that of the five qualities, Durability rated most highly, with an average weighted score of 4.

You can get started measuring success at your school, workplace, office, or organization by creating a free account, and making your own survey, today.