by PMH Atwater
Book Review by Karin Schumacher Dyke
Near-death experiences in children
by
PMH
Atwater
Book Review by Karin Schumacher Dyke
Atwater, P.M.H. (2000). Near-death experiences in children. Journal of Religion and Psychical Research, 25(1): 26-30.
Sample
The reported sample size of the adults was over 3000 Caucasian Americans, European and Arabic participants-80% of the participants, 15% of the participants being black Americans, Haitians, or Canadians – 5%, and 277 children who were classified and divided into racial categories comprised of, “60% white, 23% Latinos, 12% black, and 5% Asian (p. 26).”Methodology
While a formal methodology section is not part of this journal article and methods for gathering data are excluded, one is led by the article to make some conclusions. The writer of this article must have interviewed the subjects and coded the data as in a qualitative study. The reader is led to this conclusion by the case studies mentioned in this article and the compilation of data comparing and contrasting children’s near death experiences to adult’s near death experiences.Abstract
Ms. Atwater describes near-death experiences of children and adults of different races and identities. She then compares and contrasts this data. She also mentions some other studies that are good descriptions of the phenomena of near-death experience. She presents a case study of a woman who had a near-death experience at the age of nine days.
Important Concepts and Definitions
Near-Death experience – clinical death of a patient accompanied by successful resuscitation. The experiences of the patient of the afterlife experienced between the death and the resuscitation are known commonly as the near-death experience.Operationalizations
This study is based on interviews with people who had experienced near-death. Their stories were the focus of this report. There is no mention in the article of how the variables were coded or judged. The qualitative nature of the methods used allowed for the interviews to suffice as the data. No operationalizational description was available in this article.Major Findings
The case study of the woman who had experienced near-death at the age of nine days provides a poignant example of how these experiences effect the family. At first, the girl did not have the linguistic abilities to present the experience to others. When she was able to describe the event, she was not believed by her family members. This led her to “forget” her experience. When she did as an adult remember this experience, she was able to find “closure (p. 29)” about the experience and it actually allowed her to turn her life around in a positive way. In this way, her near-death experience allowed her to become a better person. Before she dealt with the experience, he suffered from, “lingering childhood fears and angers (p. 29),” but at the time of coming to terms with her near-death experience, it allowed these prior feelings to be replaced. She was able to mend the relationship with her family and things between them became better.