A scale to measure the strength of children's claims of previous lives: methodology and initial findings - Parapsychological Abstracts - Brief Article

Journal of Parapsychology, The, March, 2002 by Sally R. Feather

TUCKER, J. B. (2002). A scale to measure the strength of children's claims of previous lives: methodology and initial findings. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 14, 571-581.

To assess the relative strength of children's claims to remember previous lives, the author has developed a strength-of-case scale that assigns weights to features of each case that are more suggestive of a paranormal explanation. The scale was found to have a high degree of internal consistency. Analysis of 799 cases with the scale indicated that the strength of a case correlated with the economic status of the child but not his or her social status or caste. It did not correlate with the initial attitudes of the child's parents toward the case but did correlate with an early onset of statements about the previous life, the amount of emotion shown by the child when recalling the past life, and the amount of facial resemblance between the child and the deceased individual. These results are more consistent with a paranormal explanation for the cases than with a normal one.

--Author's abstract