Rensis Likert

In 1935, Likert became Director of Research for the Life Insurance Agency Management Association (LIAMA) in Hartford, Connecticut. While there, Likert began a research program to compare and evaluate the effectiveness of different modes of supervision.[4]

In 1939, Likert was invited to organize the Division of Program Surveys (DPS) at the Bureau of Agriculture Statistics (BAS). Its purpose was to gather farmers' thoughts about USDA-sponsored New Deal programs and to confront the effects of the Great Depression. Soon after, program surveys were used in other government agencies during WWII, such as the U.S. Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve Board, the Office of War Information, and the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. Likert continued to recruit other social psychologists into his growing government survey department.[5]

During World War II, as Director of the Program Surveys Division in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Agricultural Economics (B.A.E.), Likert ran surveys first for U.S.D.A. But, as the war progressed, the Division ran surveys for many different government agencies including the Office of War Information, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve Board, and, in 1944–45, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. In 1943, he developed the first national geographic sampling frame. Likert, although not at a university at the time, was actively recruiting other social psychologists into his expanding government survey shop during the war.

After the end of the war, the Department of Agriculture was forced by conservative Congressmen to stop its social survey work. Likert and his team (many of them academics on temporary wartime duty) decided to move together to a university. After scouting Cornell and Chicago, they accepted an offer in the summer of 1946 from the University of Michigan.[6] They formed the Survey Research Center (SRC) at the University of Michigan. This became the Institute for Social Research (ISR) in 1949 when Dorwin Cartwright moved the Center for Group Dynamics from MIT to the University of Michigan.[7] Likert was the director of ISR until 1970 when he retired.

Upon retirement, Likert founded Rensis Likert Associates to consult for numerous corporations. He also helped start what is now known as the Institute for Corporate Productivity. During his tenure at the Institute for Corporate Productivity, Likert devoted particular attention to research on organizations. During the 1960s and 1970s, his books on management theory were closely studied in Japan and their impact can be seen across modern Japanese organizations. He completed research on major corporations around the world, and his studies have accurately predicted the subsequent performance of the corporations.[8]

Likert contributed to the field of psychometrics by developing open-ended interviewing, a technique used to collect information about a person's thoughts, experiences, and preferences. It was common in the 1930s for researchers to use objective, closed-ended questions for the coding process to be valid. While this technique was used well in many domains, Likert saw the need for more opportunities to ask people about their attitudes towards various issues. Within open-ended interviewing, he and his colleagues invented the "funneling technique", which is a way to keep the interview open for comments, but directed in a specific way. The interview would begin with open-ended questions but gradually move into more narrowed questions. Today, open-ended interviewing is largely used in research studies where there is a need to understand people's attitudes.

Likert's method of creating the Likert scale is Rensis Likert's best-known contribution. Likert created the method in 1932 as part of his Ph.D. thesis to identify the extent of a person's attitudes and feelings towards international affairs.[9] The Likert scale is useful in conducting surveys, with applications to business-related areas such as marketing or customer satisfaction, the social sciences, and attitude-related research projects.

A Likert scale consists of the sum or average of scores from responses to a group of survey questions ("items"). Those individual-item scores are combined into a scale score according to specific psychometric methods.[10][11]