I have taken the detailed description format (copied more or less verbatim from previous censuses) as a warning from those who have gone before me. Besides, while Google Forms doesn’t really know how to handle the percents in either format, I know how to sort numbers into buckets in Google Sheets easily so I could find out “half the respondents answered between 80% and 90%” or the like.
I just checked, and Google Sheets thinks the average of “50, 40” is 45 and that the average of “50, 40%” is 25.2. I plan to stick with the current instructions for giving probabilities.
To be clear, I wasn’t proposing that the detailed description be removed! I was proposing something more like changing
Each of these questions will ask you for a probability. Please answer on a scale from 0% (definitely false) to 100% (definitely true). Do not include the percent sign in your answer. For your convenience, 0% will be interpreted as “epsilon” and 100% as “100 minus epsilon”. Do NOT give your answer in the form of a decimal between 0 and 1 unless you deliberately mean for it to be interpreted as a very small percent. For example, 0.5 will be interpreted as 0.5%, that is, a one in two hundred chance, NOT as 50%.
to
Each of these questions will ask you for a probability. Please answer on a scale from 0% (definitely false) to 100% (definitely true). Do include the percent sign in your answer. For your convenience, 0% will be interpreted as “epsilon” and 100% as “100 minus epsilon”.
Answers like “0.2%” (meaning a 1⁄500 chance) are fine. Do not write just 0.2, whether you mean 1⁄500 or 1⁄5. Answers without a final percent sign will be ignored as ambiguous. (Even if they are bigger than 1, in order to avoid bias.)
I do, however, take your point about wanting it to be easy to paste things into Google Sheets or whatever. But I don’t think there’s any avoiding the need to check for bogus answers. If you ask for no trailing percentage signs, you just know that some people will write them anyway, and then you have to do something with them so that they don’t mess up your calculations. (To be clear, this isn’t an advantage of my proposal; it’s also true that if you ask for trailing percentage signs, some people will miss them out. But “just copy and paste the whole lot into Google Sheets” isn’t a reliable approach either way, and if you’re already having to remove/repair answers where people have done the wrong thing I don’t think all-percent is either better or worse than no-percent for Google Sheets processing. The average of 50% and 40% is 0.45, which is fine.)
Counterargument: previous surveys specified to remove the percent sign. Assume some people will add it when they were told not to, and some people will leave it off if told to add it. Keeping the same format means that we could do things like take the average of all surveys, past and present, and the instruction-following population’s answers will work just fine.
I predict people are very roughly equally likely to make the mistake in either direction and currently plan to stay consistent with previous surveys.
(To be clear, if one format was better than the other, I’d just make a note to convert the data whenever we wanted to compare between years. Since both formats seem fine to me, avoiding the trivial inconvenience of conversion seems worth it.)
I have taken the detailed description format (copied more or less verbatim from previous censuses) as a warning from those who have gone before me. Besides, while Google Forms doesn’t really know how to handle the percents in either format, I know how to sort numbers into buckets in Google Sheets easily so I could find out “half the respondents answered between 80% and 90%” or the like.
I just checked, and Google Sheets thinks the average of “50, 40” is 45 and that the average of “50, 40%” is 25.2. I plan to stick with the current instructions for giving probabilities.
To be clear, I wasn’t proposing that the detailed description be removed! I was proposing something more like changing
to
I do, however, take your point about wanting it to be easy to paste things into Google Sheets or whatever. But I don’t think there’s any avoiding the need to check for bogus answers. If you ask for no trailing percentage signs, you just know that some people will write them anyway, and then you have to do something with them so that they don’t mess up your calculations. (To be clear, this isn’t an advantage of my proposal; it’s also true that if you ask for trailing percentage signs, some people will miss them out. But “just copy and paste the whole lot into Google Sheets” isn’t a reliable approach either way, and if you’re already having to remove/repair answers where people have done the wrong thing I don’t think all-percent is either better or worse than no-percent for Google Sheets processing. The average of 50% and 40% is 0.45, which is fine.)
Counterargument: previous surveys specified to remove the percent sign. Assume some people will add it when they were told not to, and some people will leave it off if told to add it. Keeping the same format means that we could do things like take the average of all surveys, past and present, and the instruction-following population’s answers will work just fine.
I predict people are very roughly equally likely to make the mistake in either direction and currently plan to stay consistent with previous surveys.
(To be clear, if one format was better than the other, I’d just make a note to convert the data whenever we wanted to compare between years. Since both formats seem fine to me, avoiding the trivial inconvenience of conversion seems worth it.)