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At first glance, it might be one of the most jarring studies of the year. A report published yesterday by the Anti-Defamation League has found that a good portion of the world’s population — about 1 billion people — harbor anti-Semitic attitudes.

The wide-reaching survey polled 53,100 adults from more than 100 countries. Those who responded affirmatively to more than 5 of the 11 questions qualified as harboring “anti-Semitic attitudes.”

Among some of the survey’s most troubling findings: about 35% of the world has never heard of the Holocaust, about 41% of respondents believe that Jews are more loyal to Israel than their own country and almost half of the world’s Muslims qualified as anti-Semitic per ADL standards.

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While undoubtedly some of the findings are troubling, don’t get too worked up over the study just yet.

While some websites, like Tablet, have branded the findings as “jaw-dropping,” others are questioning the survey’s methodology. Can global anti-Semitic trends really be measured by a few simple yes or no questions?

In an article in New York Magazine titled The ADL’s Flawed Anti-Semitism Survey, Jeni Kubota, a researcher of stereotypes and prejudices at NYU, says that polling usually allows for a range of responses so as to allow for more nuanced views of respondents’ beliefs. She argues that the survey’s results are actually hard to interpret. “[A]n individual might STRONGLY support two of these statements. Would a score of 2 out of 11 mean that the individual was not anti-Semitic? I would argue no.”

A Harvard professor quoted in the same article notes that someone might respond affirmatively to five questions would not be considered anti-Semitic, while someone who responds affirmatively to six would be branded as such.

ADL responded by noting that the methodology is a way of being “extra cautious” so as to allow for consistency in such a large study spanning so many cultures and regions, according to the article.

But Jesse Singal, the NYMag writer, concludes: “Consistency and cautiousness are good. But discriminatory beliefs are pretty complicated, and something just doesn’t sit right about a scoring system in which one person is labeled an anti-Semite and another isn’t based on a one-question difference in their responses to a survey.”

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