COMA SCIENCE GROUP – GIGA RESEARCH | www.comasciencegroup.org | Contact: hcassol@student.ulg.ac.be Our results highlight the structure of NDE narratives and give a fuller overview of the vocabulary used by NDErs to describe such ineffable experiences. Despite some differences in the extracted themes, our data corroborate the content of existing tools such as the Greyson NDE-scale3 and are concomitant with studies supporting the universality of this phenomenon4. A thematic analysis was carried out using Nvivo software (version 9.2 for Windows) on 34 narratives (written in French). This analysis enables to identify and report patterns within data1 and is commonly used in qualitative research to classify data into thematic categories2. All study participants met the inclusion criteria (i.e., Greyson NDE scale’s total score ≥ 73) to be qualified as NDErs. This study aims to contribute to the characterization of near-death experiences (NDEs) by highlighting the main themes discussed by near-death experiencers (NDErs) as well as the vocabulary they use when portraying their experience. Two experts in qualitative thematic analysis, novices in the field of NDEs, processed the retrospective self-reported NDE narratives of cardiac arrest survivors.
[1]
E. Facco,et al.
Epistemological implications of near-death experiences and other non-ordinary mental expressions: Moving beyond the concept of altered state of consciousness.
,
2015,
Medical hypotheses.
[2]
V. Braun,et al.
Using thematic analysis in psychology
,
2006
.
[3]
C. Pope,et al.
Qualitative Research in Health Care
,
1999
.
[4]
B. Greyson,et al.
The near-death experience scale. Construction, reliability, and validity.
,
1983,
The Journal of nervous and mental disease.