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Fun fact: At the end of WWII Rensis Likert (pronounced LICK-urt, everyone) was appointed United States Strategic Bombing Survey Morale Division (USSBS) in 1944.
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey was a written report created by a board of experts assembled to produce an impartial assessment of the effects of Anglo-American strategic bombing of Nazi Germany during the European theatre of World War II.
After publishing the report on Germany, the Survey members then turned their attention to Japan, in the aftermath of US bombing, including the use of atomic bombs. 
The group working on the survey included 300 civilians, 350 officers, and 500 enlisted men.
In addition to collecting first-hand reports of the experience of living through the war in order to understand the effect of bombing on civilians, they essentially conducted a customer satisfaction study with people the US had bombed.
Likert started out studying civil engineering as an undergrad because his father was an engineer with the railroad. But then after witnessing a strike as an intern with Union Pacific, he switched his major to sociology.
He developed the scale that bears his name as part of his Psychology PhD thesis. The paper is "A Technique for the Measurement of Attitudes". The subject matter he used was race relations and American Imperialism. And he heavily qualified the practice of studying attitudes.
After the war Likert, founded the Institute for Social Research at U Mich.
ISR fielded the 1954 double-blind experimental trials for the Salk polio vaccine revealing that the vaccine was both safe and effective, and ending the polio epidemic that terrorized a generation.
ISR fielded the 1954 double-blind experimental trials for the Salk polio vaccine revealing that the vaccine was both safe and effective, and ending the polio epidemic that terrorized a generation.
And he wrapped this all up with another career as a consultant a leader in the field of organizational psychology, writing several influential books about management systems and conflict in organizations.
So, no @SurveyMonkey, a Likert scale is not about "making clients happy".
It is a tool developed by a very thoughtful cross-disciplinary researcher to solve a particular problem in social science and should be used when appropriate with awareness of its purpose and limitations.
It is a tool developed by a very thoughtful cross-disciplinary researcher to solve a particular problem in social science and should be used when appropriate with awareness of its purpose and limitations.
Using a Likert scale will give you the distribution of responses to your question among respondents to your survey. That's all.
What it *means* that a particular set of responses to that particular question yielded that variation. That is a whole other thing.
What it *means* that a particular set of responses to that particular question yielded that variation. That is a whole other thing.
