The ADL’s Flawed Anti-Semitism Survey; New York Magazine, 5/14/14

Jesse Singal, New York Magazine; The ADL’s Flawed Anti-Semitism Survey:

"According to Ryan D. Enos, a political scientist at Harvard who studies inter-group relations, this sort of binary system is problematic. It “creates strange claims, such as a person that expresses these attitudes on five questions about Jewish stereotypes is okay, but a person that answers six affirmatively is an anti-Semite, same as a person that answers affirmatively on 11,” he wrote in an email. “Most people would think that is [a] strange way to label the people holding those attitudes.” Moreover, he argued, “researchers don’t tend to believe that people can usefully be split into people that simply either do or do not have prejudice against another group.” Prejudice “operates on a continuum, not [as] a yes or no.”

Jeni Kubota, an NYU researcher who studies stereotypes and prejudice (and who praised the report for the impressively large swath of the world it covered), pointed out that researchers generally allow for a range of responses on these sorts of questions so as to build a more nuanced view of respondents’ beliefs."