Using IST with journals and short free text
Research guidance, 27 September 2026. This guide concerns the five-criterion Freedom from Fusion (FFF) score and the separate concern-preservation assessment. Use it when preparing existing writing or planning repeated reflections.
Choose the account to match the question
For contemplative experience, retain the participant’s description of the experience, including changes in self-experience, awareness, motivation or connection that they themselves mention. For responses to everyday situations, retain enough context to understand what happened and how the writer related to it. Existing journals, study reflections and experience reports can supply both kinds of material.
A neutral elicitation is: “Describe a recent situation that mattered to you and what you experienced, thought or did.” This is an optional practical prompt, not an additional validated instrument. Do not ask participants to demonstrate self-transcendence or to use spiritual language. If the study already has a suitable prompt, preserve it consistently across groups and occasions.
For integration within an episode, ask what happened, how the person understood it and what mattered in deciding how to respond. When studying change, also ask how the initial reaction and later response differed. Collecting this sequence allows FFF and CP to be interpreted within the same situation.
How much text?
The evaluation distinguishes naturally brief writing from prefixes cut out of longer accounts. Naturally brief accounts can express a complete perspective in a few sentences; a cut-off account can lose its main point or the later qualification that changes its meaning.
Aim for a complete, substantive account of roughly 50–100 words as a practical starting target. Keep shorter accounts that express a perspective, and retain longer relevant accounts intact. The closing reflection may change the meaning of what came before. A word target helps plan the task; it should not encourage filler or become an automatic exclusion rule.
When counting words, count participant text, excluding task instructions, speaker labels and administrative metadata. Preserve an eliciting question or sentence stem as context where the response depends on it, and report participant-word counts separately.
Which writing is scoreable?
Relevant evidence can be fused, self-transcendent, uncertain, calm or distressed. The key question is whether the supplied account expresses a perspective, motivation, relationship to experience or way of responding that the FFF criteria can assess. First-person pronouns and emotional intensity are not prerequisites. Reports of selflessness sometimes contain neither.
Empty entries have no score. Pure administrative text, copied instructions or a factual report without an interpretable stance should be flagged for context review. Keep the reason for any exclusion. A short answer that depends on its prompt should be read with that prompt. Quoted teaching material should not silently be attributed to the writer as their own experience. Keep externally supplied quotations, study labels and instructions in separate fields before scoring. Current FFF scoring was trained to resist presentation changes while recognizing differences in meaning; see the robustness results and examples. Do not strip spiritual language from a participant’s actual account: distinguish ownership, rather than selecting vocabulary.
Review inputs before submission
Flag empty entries, administrative text and copied instructions for review. Retain the original rows and record any exclusions. A brief response should be read with its eliciting question; keep that question in a separate column. Where a participant quotes someone else, preserve the attribution.
Journal entries and repeated observations
For pre/post use, keep the prompt, recall window and sampling schedule comparable. For example, ask about a recent interpersonal difficulty at both assessments; avoid comparing everyday conflicts before training with exceptional meditation experiences afterward. Keep occasion and intervention labels outside scoring inputs. Compare the same concern functions and report their assessable coverage.
In repeated sentence completions, reported practice was associated with FFF change over 24 months; this was an observational association and was less certain after adjustment for response-length change. The eighteen-stem form follows full-protocol change more closely than shorter forms. Journal accounts can be scored repeatedly, but their sensitivity to contemplative change still needs direct evaluation. See the current findings and form comparison.
For an episode-level question, retain one score per account and analyze the accounts with their episode-specific measures. For a study of patterns across a person’s journal, sample several relevant occasions and report how many entries and words contribute. Use the same sampling rule across participants rather than selecting only their most reflective entries.
Repeated scoring of identical text measures scorer repeatability. Differences across journal entries also reflect the situations described, what the writer chose to express and possible changes over time. Keep those sources of variation distinct when deciding whether an average answers the study question. The available repeated-news-reaction analysis provides an empirical example; it does not establish a universal number of journal entries.
Concern preservation requires relevant context
Word count alone cannot establish an opportunity to assess concern preservation. Identify the concern and what role it could play in the episode. Preserve any surrounding sentence that shows acknowledgment, a boundary, a competing consideration, cancellation or later repair. An extractor that retains only emotionally salient sentences can remove precisely that context.
Keep each response with its prompt and relevant context. Short responses can still provide enough evidence to assess Concern Preservation. Keep concern-preservation scores, categories and evidence coverage alongside FFF.
Report a small set of administration details
Report the elicitation or journal-selection rule; participant and episode counts; word-count distribution; text preparation, language and translation; and any exclusions and their reasons. When aggregating, report contributing entry counts and use analyses that account for repeated observations.
Free IST scoring is available to COFO-funded, institutionally affiliated noncommercial research teams, up to 100 participants per team per request. Larger requests and other teams require a custom agreement. First contact tamas.madl@ofai.at, preferably from your institutional email address, with your study description, COFO funding reference, participant count, and number of assessments or accounts per participant. We confirm the scope and provide encrypted file-transfer instructions before you send de-identified accounts. Use email to arrange scoring; do not attach participant files. See the submission guide and service terms.