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.
Likert scale is naturally an ordinal data, and it is a non-parametric data. Data of Likert scale is naturally non-normally distributed. it is because most of the time we can't get a normal curve - bell shape- it can happen only when most of the respondents in a sample choose the middle scale 3 (unsure or undecided).