The NDE Scale

I appreciate Benjamin Radford's summation of the NDE Scale [for assessing Near-Death Experiences] in the May/June 2007 issue that it "is a legitimate effort at bringing rigor to a subject notoriously difficult to quantify." That was the scale's purpose, to foster a scientific approach in a field prone to claims by both spiritualists and materialists that went far beyond the meager data. The scale is imperfect, and, as Radford noted, it is possible to score high on it without being near death. It was developed simply to assure that various NDE researchers were investigating the same phenomenon.

Radford was mistaken, however, that the NDE Scale "is rarely used or cited today." Citations of the scale in peer-reviewed journals have in fact increased in recent years; virtually every recent prospective study of NDEs has used it, and it has been translated by Dutch, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, and Chinese researchers.

Although the NDE Scale was initially developed on a modest sample of seventy-four NDEs, it has been validated in a recent sample of 292 experiencers in a sophisticated Rasch analysis by skeptics Rense Lange and Jim Houran in the British Journal of Psychology, and a test-retest challenge found the NDE Scale statistically reliable over a twenty-year period. Of course, establishing the reliability and validity of a measure of NDEs implies nothing about the cause of the experiences.

Bruce Greyson, M.D.

Carlson Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences

University of Virginia Health System

Charlottesville, Virginia

COPYRIGHT 2007 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
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