Adjusting the consensus measure to target ordinal scale arguments

Much research data is collected and analyzed as ordinal scale data. The Likert scale is an example of such a data collection tool. Comparing different Likert scale data sets can be difficult, for no specific tool has been identified that is conceptually sound, though researchers typically apply ratio scale mathe-matics to the data. In this paper a modification of the consensus measure is examined and shown to be a valuable tool in the comparison and ranking of ordinal data. By identifying a specific target category, i.e., the "strongly agree" category of a Likert scale, the target consensus measure calculates a value between 0 and 1, the 0 identifying a Likert scale frequency distribution as being the furthest distance possible from the targeted value, and the 1 representing all values being assigned to the targeted category.