It's a common practice in survey design.
From Wikipedia: "A Likert item is simply a statement that the respondent is asked to evaluate by giving it a quantitative value on any kind of subjective or objective dimension, with level of agreement/disagreement being the dimension most commonly used...
The format of a typical five-level Likert item, for example, could be:
Strongly disagree Disagree Neither agree nor disagree Agree Strongly agree"
This is much different than "Give a number 1-5 to iPhone."
"This is much different than "Give a number 1-5 to iPhone.""
They wrote:
"They were prompted with 12 different Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1 to 5 and optionally provide text commentary per category"
So, unless they are not being explicit about their survey question, which imo would make little sense, especially if it is a traditional Likert scale which is used in context of a question, it does tell us that.
Regardless, my point is that the survey trying to quantify a score is much less valuable than the qualitative points in the article.