Our stance is generally a pragmatic one. It's very common practice to analyze data this way, so we enable it. But if you want to analyze your Likerts as ordinal data, you can change the variable type to Ranks (ie Ordinal), where we handle the result as you'd expect (nonparametric test, no averages). Note that this feature is disabled in the demo.
Agreed, Likerts are definitely an area of controversy.
A couple references from Wikipedia about Likert-as-continuous:
Pro: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20146096
Con: http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/18751725/128169439/name/1Likert...
Our stance is generally a pragmatic one. It's very common practice to analyze data this way, so we enable it. But if you want to analyze your Likerts as ordinal data, you can change the variable type to Ranks (ie Ordinal), where we handle the result as you'd expect (nonparametric test, no averages). Note that this feature is disabled in the demo.
Thanks!
edit: formatting