German left-wing radicals say Jews have ‘too much influence’

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23. i don't think you would consider anything proof

so with these surveys, you try to get a lot of participants because you really can't control with stratified sampling or similar techniques. 36,000 is a good number. you have questions relating to political viewpoint, like "should the tax code be more progressive", "is defense funding too high or too low or just right", "should corporations be more or less regulated", "should ... (questions relating to approval of German constitution" and then mixed in questions relating to attitudes toward people "do you think Jews have too much influence" "are Jews overly interested in money" and you have questions about other things too. So, no obvious pattern in the questions. You then sort people into categories for purposes of the study as moderate, moderate left, right, extreme left, etc based on their answers on the first set and you define "holding anti-semitic views" as having the associated answers to the questions about Jews. With this survey, you can't say x% of Germans have these views because maybe - this is the problem with online - the people answering tended to be internet people who are maybe more extremist or more left or whatever. You can say - as the authors did 34% of people who answered and were assigned to category of radical left also gave responses we defined as representing anti-semitic views. Credible study.

Maybe you don't like that they used "Jews have too much influence" and "Jews are overly interested in money" as their definition of holding anti-semitic views. Then you disapprove of the wording of the results as representing anti-semitism, even though the results themselves are valid. Do you think those two questions indicate anti-semitic views?

Maybe you don't like the way responses they used to categorize respondentws as radical leftist.

They don't do studies like "What is your name?" Hans. "What are your politics" "I am a radical leftist" "are you anti-semitic" "Yes"

This is a quite large scale study by academic standards. If you need more proof, it is not possible to produce it.

This isn't an accusation - it is reporting the results of a study. The study IS the exact evidence for what is being reported. The German leftists aren't being punished for holding anti-semitic views. They don't themselves classify these views as anti-semitic, much as some people don't classify support for Hamas terrorism (not in this study) as anti-semitic. There is no real consequence here. The study just tells us - reliably! - that a substantial proportion of people who hold the views that the authors name as radical leftist also hold views that the authors (and common sense?) classify as anti-semitic. And that the proportion is higher among radical leftists than mere extreme leftists. And, I believe, higher among extreme leftists than among the general population completing the survey.

If one does not trust social science, but only trust one's gut, one will develop ideas that cannot be challenged and one may find oneself holding some strong but wrong viewpoints.