Having viewed some of the highly edited videotaped material of Terri Schiavo and having seen other patients in a persistent vegetative state, I am not surprised that family members and others unfamiliar with this condition would interpret some of her apparent alertness and movement as meaningful.
A Likert Scale is a type of psychometric scale frequently used in psychology questionnaires. It was developed by and named after organizational psychologist Rensis Likert. Self-report inventories are one of the most widely used tools in psychological research.
March 2011. 15 (1) 10-14. 12 Because they confuse Likert items with Likert scales, many authors look at a single Likert item and conclude that the 1 2 3 4 and 5 options form an ordinal scale at best, and therefore data based on these scales must be analyzed as though they are ordinal.