Not applicable in likert scale

I want to create a survey that has 20 statements with likert scale responses (1 strong disagree to 5 strongly agree) and the option of not applicable/I don’t know. Is it possible to automatically exclude the statement from the calculation and not treat it as a zero?

For example is a respondent has 19 responses with numeric answers (let’s assume 5 for all) and 1 not applicable, I would like the calculation to be the total out of 19 (95/95) not out of 20 (95/100).

As another example, if another respondent has 18 responses with 4 for all and 2 not applicable, I would like it to automatically calculate 72/90 instead of 90/100.

In an ideal world it would also be awesome to know how many N/As were selected but if that is beyond possible I can manually count that.

Thank you.

Hello!

It occurred to me that you could include an additional ‘Not Applicable/I Don’t Know’ option in the Likert scale and assign it a specific value, such as 6. Then, you would calculate the score for each of the 20 statements, treating any response with this value (6) as 0. The total_score would be the sum of all individual scores from the 20 statements. You should then count the number of responses with a valid score, excluding those marked as 6.

Finally, the overall score could be calculated by dividing the total score by the number of valid responses, multiplying by 5 to get the average on the same scale, and then by 100 to convert it to a percentage.

Hope I’ve made myself clear! Cheers :slight_smile:

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@laurariddering, I agree with what @bdplazo has advised. But could you also share with the community the response code that you intend to use?

Thank you for the fast responses. I will play around with options and report back if I am able to find a simple solution.