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.)
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.)