The use of midpoint on Likert scale: The implications for educational research

This article is going to review the debate of the use of midpoints on Likert scale in order to understand the implications for scale construction. In this review, the major issues around this debate are identified. The first is methodological. The debate around this issue is the concern about whether the midpoints affect the reliability and validity of measurements. The second issue is epistemological. It concerns about how researchers exactly know the meaning of the responses into midpoints that they intend to measure. To some extent, the debate based on the methodological issue illustrates that both using and not using of midpoints are acceptable, because the midpoints may not really affect the reliability and validity. Therefore, the epistemological issue while designing the rating scale of a measurement is the focus of this article. The implications of the debate for educational research are also discussed in this article. Copyright © 2012 The Hong Kong Teachers’ Centre.