Choose a sentence-completion form, or use existing journals, reflections or interviews. IST reports Freedom from Fusion and Concern Preservation. Ego-development stage scoring is a separate, optional service.
IST research scoring
Free for eligible COFO-funded research
Free IST scoring for institutionally affiliated, noncommercial research teams funded by COFO, for up to 100 participants per team per request.
Available with all three forms or suitable existing writing. Larger requests need a custom agreement; other research teams are welcome to enquire.
Separate service · LeadershipMaturity.ai
€20 per assessment for COFO-funded research
Includes participants’ stage of ego development (Cook-Greuter) and Total Weighted Score (TWS) only. Maturity indicators and coaching comments are not included.
Requires the full 36-stem form. This research rate is subsidized by LeadershipMaturity.ai. Other research teams can enquire about pricing.
LeadershipMaturity.ai’s fuller Actionable Growth Report costs €150 and includes maturity indicators and coaching comments. No debrief is required for research where participants do not receive their scores. Individual feedback has a separate debrief fee. Report options and pricing.
We confirm eligibility, study scope and any charges before scoring.
All three forms provide FFF and CP results. The number of prompts determines participant burden and the range of concerns covered.
Brief group studies
IST outputs: FFF score, five criterion scores and CP judgments.
Access: download the participant form, or enquire about your study.
Tracking change; broader concern coverage
IST outputs: FFF score, five criterion scores and CP judgments.
Access: form and collection materials available on request.
Enquire about 18 stemsFull assessment
IST outputs: FFF score, five criterion scores and CP judgments.
Access: available on request. The same responses can also be used for the separate paid ego-development assessment.
Enquire about 36 stemsThe sentence stems are copyrighted by Susanne Cook-Greuter. The 18- and 36-stem forms are available on request.
| Form | Meditators vs controls, g | Average score difference from 32 stems | Agreement with change on 32 stems, r | Concern areas prompted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 stems | 2.03 [1.29, 3.26] | 0.17 points | .76 | 5 of 6 |
| 18 stems | 2.13 [1.39, 3.52] | 0.09 points | .87 | 6 of 6 |
| 36 stems | 2.26 [1.64, 3.47] | 0.04 points | .98 | 6 of 6 |
The reference uses the 32 stems available across the archival datasets; the complete form has 36. Short-form results use answers taken from longer administrations in the same cohorts used to select the forms. Independent administrations remain to be evaluated. Change agreement compares overlapping forms in 36 participants followed for 24 months. Answers to the ten stems contained a median of 62 written words in the archived tests. Forms share responses with the reference. Group comparisons use the same 13 meditators and 15 controls; brackets give participant-bootstrap 95% intervals. Concern areas count the domains prompted by the form, not the participant’s CP result.
Response workbook: IST10_response_template.xlsx. Read the researcher guide.
Participants complete unfinished sentences, or stems, such as “When I am criticized…”, in their own words. Give participants the form’s neutral instructions and keep its wording and order. Participants may skip items; leave unanswered items blank. Use the same form at every occasion, with participant and occasion codes in separate columns.
The stems retain the wording of the traditional instrument, including historical references to gender and family roles. Studies already using the five-stem form can contact us.
createIST10Form and authorize it. The execution log links the new form and response sheet.exportIST10Responses and download the Scoring export sheet as CSV.Your lab controls the form and sheet; the builder sends nothing to us.
IST measures Freedom from Fusion and Concern Preservation. LeadershipMaturity.ai separately offers ego-development stage scoring using Cook-Greuter’s SCTi-MAP framework. Participants completing the full 36-stem form can obtain both assessments from the same responses.
The automated ego-development scoring method was validated against expert ratings (Madl & Cook-Greuter, 2026). The COFO research package provides stage and TWS only. View pricing and report options.
Ego-development stage and TWS are supplied only when separately requested and purchased. The €20 research package does not include maturity indicators or coaching comments.
Example workbook with four constructed accounts: example_results.xlsx.
“If I had more money I would maintain my current lifestyle and have more means to accomplish goals of helping family and causes that I think are important to support”
Helping family and supporting valued causes contribute to the higher Internal Validation and Intrinsic Motivation ratings. The overall FFF score averages all five criteria, including those less clearly expressed in this short completion.
The specified concern is the practical role of material resources. Money remains important as a means of helping family and supporting those causes, so that concern is preserved.
Scores run from 1 to 10, but averages over a whole test occupy a narrower range. In the comparison of 13 long-term meditators with 15 controls, the mean difference was 0.71 points. Use the overall Freedom from Fusion score for questions about the broad profile. The five criterion ratings show which qualities contribute; a study focused on a particular quality can specify that criterion as its outcome. For group and longitudinal comparisons, use comparable prompts or account types and a consistent sampling rule. Longer answers tend to score higher, so report response length. Neither result has cutoffs.
Tell us about your study. We confirm the scope, eligibility and any charges, then provide materials and encrypted transfer instructions.
Or email tamas.madl@ofai.at with your institution, study description, participant count, COFO funding and preferred form. Please do not attach participant files.
Request Freedom from Fusion, Concern Preservation or both. Send the supplied workbook or a CSV/XLSX file with participant codes, responses, the prompts that elicited them, stem identifiers and occasion codes. Keep study conditions out of the response text. Replace names with relationships (“my sister”) and dates with relative timing (“three weeks later”), and remove identifying places and contact details, including those of third persons. By sending files you confirm that you hold the permissions needed for the material. No account registration, collaboration or contribution of your data to our research is required.
Keep complete accounts and the questions that elicited them; roughly 50–100 participant-written words per account is a practical target, without trimming or padding. Put each account in its own row with participant code, prompt and occasion code in separate columns. Keep attributed teaching quotations clearly marked as quotations.
For new reflections, ask about a concrete episode: what happened, how the participant understood it, what mattered in deciding how to respond, and how the initial reaction and later response differed. For pre/post designs, keep the prompt and recall window constant. The free-text guide gives details.
The sentence-completion forms come with predefined concerns. For journals and reflections, specify whose concern is being assessed and whether the judgment concerns the initial reaction, the later response or the episode as a whole. Use the same concern and time scope across comparable accounts; we can help specify them.
Each concern receives one of four judgments. A protocol summary is available when at least four concern domains are assessable: within each domain, calculate the share of assessable concerns judged fully preserved, then average those shares. Report the category counts and assessable domains alongside this 0–1 summary. “Insufficient evidence” means the account does not establish how the concern was treated.
Publications, preprints and reports using Freedom from Fusion scores must cite Madl & Cook-Greuter (2026) and Madl & Lazar (2026). Those using Concern Preservation alone must cite Madl & Lazar (2026). We supply the references with your results.
We accept de-identified research text only. Files are transferred encrypted and processed on OFAI-operated servers in Vienna. Only Tamas Madl, who runs the scoring service, can access submitted text. Texts are not sent to public-cloud or commercial AI providers and are not used for model training, tuning or evaluation. Files and results are deleted after delivery; we keep only a record of job size, date and scoring version. Files that arrive with identifying information are deleted unscored. We can provide a description of the processing for ethics applications.
Use the same scoring version throughout a study. Research-use terms.