Analyzing a Likert Item

[Adeola Akintola]

I am analyzing a dataset which has a likert item with seven responses measuring satisfaction as an outcome. How best do I analyze this outcome.

Adeola Akintola

[Jared Greathouse]

Ordered logit regression. Stata's ologit.

[Adeola Akintola]

@Jared. Thank you. My worry will be that among the responses, there are some cells that has very few counts. I am thinking this will affect my result. Can I use multinominal regression.

[Andrew Musau]

You can look to combine such choices into an "other" category. There are also tests for combining dependent categories in multinomial logit, so these may suggest combining the seldom chosen options with those more frequently chosen. If your scale is ordinal, then the combination should be with adjacent categories. See Richard Williams's notes on tests for combining dependent categories: https://www3.nd.edu/~rwilliam/stats3/Mlogit2.pdf

[Adeola Akintola]

Andrew Musau, thank you.

[Weiwen Ng]

Just to add a bit to what Andrew said: if you have a very skewed distribution where some response categories are sparse, using multinomial logit regression will not improve the result. I think it will make things worse.