2017-09-18, 12:56 AM
(2017-09-17, 03:14 AM)Dante Wrote: [ -> ]I understand the risk that comes with not getting to the cases as soon as the child initially says something, as do Tucker and as did Stevenson.
Do you consider it to be a significant risk?
Quote:As far as the birthmarks go, I'm not particularly familiar with that part of the research - but nonetheless, the few cases I've read involving them have been a mix of what I found to be impressive and not so impressive, or more likely to be due to coincidence.
For the "children refer to themselves in the first person" thing, I just don't see how that would explain the research, and I know you noted that... but I think it's self explanatory enough that it wouldn't shock me if the researchers hadn't touched on it (and they may have, I don't recall but I haven't read nearly all the books the two of them have published - only a couple among other articles and interviews). It's one thing for a kid to say, "Look! That's me! I'm batman!" or something of that ilk, like a famous character, super hero, or video game character, and of course an entirely different thing when a child says something about being a random person from another location while simultaneously listing a number of facts about that person that they should or would have no access to, if they even had the capacity to remember the information if it was ever told to them. And I know you said that you're not making the claim that this is part of what may be going on in these cases, but I would think these reasons are obvious enough that maybe the researchers devoted time to other possible explanations or reasoning first. Again, I'm also not certain that they've never addressed it, though off the top of my head I can't recall that I've personally read such a thing.
If the children have been given the suggestion that they may have a past life, combined with at least some children's propensity towards identifying with such suggestions, I think it is something that deserves some serious attention.
One thing I learned as a parent, to my surprise, was that my children, even when they could barely speak, took in much more than I thought. For example, we'd have conversations in the car, thinking that the kids were oblivious when they would say something that indicated they had taken it all in.
The problem with many of these cases is that we have no idea to what extent such influences could have impacted on the children - even if the parents didn't believe they had.
Remember, with risks of bias we often have no way of knowing whether the bias impacted the results or not. That is why we identify risk rather than try to identify actual bias (see the links fls provided for more on this).
The objective in analyzing the cases is to determine how significant the risk of bias. If it is significant, the case must be downgraded if we are trying to approach an objective assessment. This is the case even if we haven't identified a specific bias in play. As the Cochrane handbook suggests, trying to nail down exactly what effect a particular bias had is a fools game. Rather, we perform experiments with the bias included, and without and compare the results. If it is not possible to perform the experiment without, well, we're just stuck with the risk I guess.
Quote:Interviewing children is, of course, going to be "risky" - but this is, as with most things, best addressed specifically with regards to an actual case rather tan broadly. This doesn't really hold a lot of water for me when there are thousands of cases and I don't think that the method of questioning by scientifically cautious and methodologically careful researchers who have been at this for awhile is especially likely to be suspect. They are aware of the difficulties of doing the research, and I believe do their best to conduct the research in as unbiased a way as possible.
Even if the researchers have done their job expertly (which is harder than one might think), it is virtually certain that the people interviewing the children before the experts arrive haven't had that training. Like I suggested above, the risk is high even before the investigators get on the scene.
Quote:Of course there is risk of bias/error, as there is with everything that any human is directly involved in. I wouldn't say it is extra fraught with that risk - of course, because the subjects are also human beings, there is more subjectivity and risk, but I don't think "fraught with" is accurate, and I think that because the researchers appreciate the importance of their work and know how important their methodology is, they try their best to control for it, which it seems you've acknowledged.
I generally assume the researchers are trying their best. If that were enough we wouldn't need to develop all these protocols such as double blinding. We develop these protocols in order to overcome our weaknesses.
Quote:In spite of what you said, I think that an actual reading case by case makes it fairly difficult to assign some form of bias, coincidence, luck, or fraud to the majority of the cases, especially the stronger ones, which aren't lacking in number. Speaking generally has its place but won't move the needle much for me or others who are familiar with a large number of cases and the researchers' works and noted caveats.
There's more to say on this but briefly: despite the number, remember that what we are looking at is a selected sample of cases collected all over the world. By definition we are dealing with rare events. What we can infer is that there is a good chance that something rare happened in these cases, whether of mundane or non-mundane origins.
In other words, when it comes to these cases we should expect the unexpected to be involved. We must be careful not to lose the forest for the trees.