Plotting Likert and Other Rating Scales

Rating scales such as Likert scales and semantic differential scales are very common in marketing research, customer satisfaction studies, psychometrics, opinion surveys, and numerous other fields. We illustrate, review, and critique several forms of graphical presentation of results from studies using rating scales. These graphical forms include tables, bar charts of means, grouped bar charts, divided bar charts, ribbon charts, multiple pie charts, waffle plots, radar plots, and diverging stacked bar charts. We show the advantages of and recommend diverging stacked bar charts. We demonstrate how to create diverging stacked bar charts in R and Tableau.