Developing a scale to measure paranormal experiences

Currently, there is no existing measure of paranormal experiences. A large amount of work has attempted to identify the factors that correlate with paranormal experiences (i.e., experiences that lay outside of our current scientific understanding, including those that appear to support the existence of extra-sensory perception, psychokinesis and the survival of bodily death). Attempts to identify the formation and impact of such experiences have adopted a broad range of perspectives, including work investigating whether they fulfil a need for control (e.g., Irwin, 1992; Lawrence et al., 1995), help to sustain a religious/spiritual worldview (e.g., Haraldsson, 1981; Thalbourne & Hootkooper, 2002), reflect the existence of genuine paranormal phenomena (e.g., Alcock et al., 2003; Radin, 1997), involve misattributing paranormal causation to normal experiences (e.g., Wiseman & Watt, 2006), and promote wellbeing (Palmer & Braud, 2002; Greyson, 2013). However, most of this work has employed relatively broad-brush measures of whether participants have had one or more paranormal experience(s), including those that involve single questions or very general categories. The proposed work aims to address this issue by developing a more nuanced and fine-grained measure of such experiences. It will involve developing a psychometrically robust scale that allows participants to indicate which, if any, experiences they have had and contain a series of sub-scales that will help researchers to better identify the correlates of alleged phenomena.