A computer program for Likert format questionnaire analysis

Abstract

On college and university campuses, Likert format questionnaires are used for student evaluation of diverse aspects of courses, often with multiple items ~rouped into ~ets with a common referent (e.g., instructor, assignments, presentations, etc.). Contrary to summated rating scales which yield a total score to place a respondent somewhere on a continuum of agreement-disagreement toward the attitude being measured (Kerlinger, 1973), course evaluation questionnaires are typically analyzed to obtain respondent group means to each item or to sets of items. Moreover, the instructor examines the number and percentage of respondents selecting each al~er.native and makes comparisons among items within a set and between sets of items to determine relative strengths and weaknesses of the course. While subprograms of larger statistical analysis packages, such as SPSS (Nie, Hull, Jenkins, Steinbrenner, & Bent, 1975), will perform analyses such as those described, they are often inappropriate because they (1) require a computer system large enough to support the entire package, (2) cannot perform an analysis of individual items and sets of items. simultaneously, and (3) generate more output than IS necessary while requiring extensive variable and parameter definition. The program described in this paper performs the an~lyses typically sought for Likert format questionnam~s ~suc~ as ~ourse evaluations) while overcoming the Iimitations Imposed by larger generalized statistical analysis packages. Input. The job deck consists of the following: title card~, a. problem. parameters card, item group specification card, Item group label cardts), optional question and response choice label cards, a data format card, data deck, and a last card. The first three cards describe the problem in a text which is reproduced on the output. The problem parameters card indicates the number of respondents, the population size, the number of item sets, and user preference for optional alphanumeric labeling. The next card specifies the number of items in each set (or the total number of items if they are ungrouped) and is followed by item group labels (one per card to a maximum of 80 characters). If the user selects alphanumeric output labeling, the next cards contain the questions (one per card to a maximum of 80 characters) and the response alternatives (one per card to a maximum of 20 characters) in the same