Scientists Create First Tool to Measure How Well People Actually Meditate

For decades, mindfulness researchers have counted the minutes people spend meditating, as though time on the cushion were the only thing that mattered. A new study published in the journal Mindfulness argues that this approach misses something crucial: how well a person actually meditates. An international team led by Sarah Strohmaier of Victoria University in Melbourne, together with Bruno A. Cayoun, Alice G. Shires, Oleg N. Medvedev and Christian U. Krägeloh, has developed and validated the Mindfulness Meditation Practice Quality Scales, or MMPQS, the first measurement instruments designed specifically to quantify the quality of two central forms of mindfulness meditation. Tested in a clinical population of 368 adults receiving Mindfulness-integrated Cognitive Behavior Therapy, the new scales promise to change how scientists, clinicians and meditators think about what happens between the first breath and the final bell.

The problem the researchers set out to solve is surprisingly basic. Mindfulness research has exploded over the past two decades, with hundreds of trials showing benefits for mental health and well-being in both clinical and non-clinical populations. Yet the overwhelming majority of studies have measured practice quantity, such as how many minutes or sessions participants completed, while treating practice quality as an unmeasured black box. Existing mindfulness questionnaires capture related but different constructs, including trait mindfulness, which reflects a person’s general disposition, and state mindfulness, which captures momentary awareness during practice. Others assess adherence to practice schedules or mechanisms like equanimity. None, according to the authors, had ever been built to assess the quality of the practices themselves, even though evidence suggests that quality, not just duration, may drive outcomes, particularly for novice meditators who have not yet learned to hold attention steadily.

Drawing on Buddhist psychology and modern clinical practice, the team focused on the two practices they describe as the fundamental pillars of mindfulness meditation: concentration, known in the Pali tradition as śamatha, and insight, known as vipassanā. In śamatha practice, the meditator rests attention on a single object, typically the sensation of breath at the nostrils, training the executive functions of sustaining attention, inhibiting the habitual pull toward thoughts, and shifting attention back without frustration. In vipassanā practice, the meditator opens awareness to whatever arises, observing body sensations, emotions and thoughts as impermanent, impersonal phenomena. The researchers deliberately excluded loving-kindness practice from the initial instrument, noting that classical taxonomies classify it as an affective-directed method distinct from the cognitive-directed śamatha and vipassanā practices taught in the earliest Buddhist sources.

The MMPQS was designed to be completed immediately after a meditation session, capturing the practice while it remains fresh. Each of the two scales began with ten items rated on a seven-point Likert scale ranging from not at all true to completely true. Item development drew on traditional meditation manuals and the clinical teaching sequence of MiCBT, and items were refined through an iterative consensus process among experienced meditation teachers on the research team. Concentration items probe the ability to stay focused and to refocus quickly after distraction, with examples such as being able to return to the breath after thoughts or images intervene. Insight items assess the capacity to feel a range of sensations in the body, to perceive experience with objectivity and distance, and to avoid reacting to physical, emotional or mental events, mapping directly onto the interoceptive awareness, equanimity and impermanence components of vipassanā.

What distinguishes this study methodologically is its use of Rasch analysis, a psychometric approach that many readers will find both technical and quietly revolutionary. Traditional scoring of questionnaires assumes that Likert-scale responses behave like interval data, so that the difference between scores of 25 and 26 means the same as the difference between 29 and 30. In reality, ordinal ratings rarely satisfy this assumption, introducing measurement error into every downstream analysis. Rasch models explicitly acknowledge the ordinal nature of the data and provide a mathematically principled conversion from raw summed scores to interval-level estimates on a logit scale. The researchers provide conversion tables so that clinicians and researchers can transform raw MMPQS scores without additional software, enabling precise detection of change over time and meaningful comparisons across groups and studies.

The Rasch analysis itself was an iterative winnowing process. Data came from 368 clinical participants at two psychology clinic sites, all diagnosed with at least one comorbid mental health condition and most seeking help for anxiety disorders. Participants completed the Concentration scale after concentration practices and the Insight scale after insight practices on two measurement occasions, with combined samples of 414 and 313 observations respectively. On the Concentration scale, items measuring things like feeling that time passed quickly or feeling motivated and engaged proved to be double-barreled, vague or peripheral to the construct, while two nearly identical refocusing items created local dependency. Removing these and combining two remaining dependent item pairs as testlets yielded a clean six-item scale with high reliability, person separation index values between 0.89 and 0.94, and strict unidimensionality.

The Insight scale presented a different pattern of problems. Its initial items all fit the Rasch model, but the scale failed tests of unidimensionality, and one item showed differential item functioning by age, meaning it behaved differently for younger and older respondents. Through successive rounds of analysis, redundant and double-barreled items were removed until a six-item version emerged that preserved full coverage of the insight construct: two items for interoceptive awareness, two for equanimity, and two for awareness of impermanence and non-self. Neither final scale showed differential item functioning for age, gender, prior meditation experience or time of measurement, indicating that the instruments perform equivalently across these groups and that changes in scores over the course of treatment reflect genuine improvements in practice quality rather than shifting item behavior.

Validity testing delivered results that the authors describe as consistent with their hypotheses. Both scales showed small to moderate correlations in the expected directions with measures of equanimity, depression, anxiety, stress, awareness, kindness, life satisfaction and self-efficacy for meditation, supporting construct and divergent validity. More striking were the predictive findings. Concentration practice quality significantly predicted lower levels of depression, anxiety and stress, though not life satisfaction. Insight practice quality predicted reduced symptoms and, uniquely, increased life satisfaction. The authors suggest the difference may reflect the sequential structure of the therapy: concentration training begins in week two and is practiced for only a week or two before insight practices are introduced, possibly too brief a window for patients to feel meaningful gains in life satisfaction so early in treatment. Scores on both scales also rose significantly from the first to the second measurement occasion, consistent with the idea that practice quality improves with continued training.

For clinicians and teachers, the appeal of the MMPQS lies in its practicality. Because the scales are short and administered immediately after practice, they can serve as feedback tools, helping novice meditators understand the skills their practice is meant to cultivate, tracking their progress session by session, and flagging specific difficulties, whether sustaining attention or holding equanimity in the face of unpleasant sensations, that may warrant extra guidance. A participant scoring 25 on the raw Concentration scale, for example, converts to an interval score of 22.11, while a score of 30 converts to 25.10, with equal intervals between converted scores now representing genuine equal units of the underlying ability rather than arbitrary ordinal steps.

The authors are careful about the limits of their findings. The validation sample was culturally homogeneous, predominantly White Australian adults treated within a single therapy program, and the iterative, partly data-driven item selection could have capitalized on chance characteristics of this particular sample, so confirmation in independent samples is needed before the six-item solutions are treated as final. Detailed practice frequency and duration data were not collected, and the temporal lag between concentration and insight training introduces a confound into the predictive analyses. Future work will extend the MMPQS to non-clinical populations, culturally diverse samples, other mindfulness-based programs, and eventually a loving-kindness subscale. Still, the study marks a turning point: for the first time, researchers can measure not just whether people meditate, but whether they meditate well, opening a path toward understanding precisely how the quality of attention, equanimity and insight translates into relief from suffering.

Subject of Research: Development and validation of scales measuring the quality of mindfulness meditation practices using Rasch analysis

Article Title: Development and Validation of the Mindfulness Meditation Practice Quality Scales (MMPQS) in a Clinical Population Using Rasch Analysis

Article References: Strohmaier, S., Cayoun, B. A., Shires, A. G., Medvedev, O. N., & Krägeloh, C. U. (2026). Development and Validation of the Mindfulness Meditation Practice Quality Scales (MMPQS) in a Clinical Population Using Rasch Analysis. Mindfulness. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-026-02990-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12671-026-02990-9

Keywords: mindfulness, meditation, Rasch analysis, psychometrics, MMPQS, clinical psychology, Mindfulness-integrated Cognitive Behavior Therapy, concentration meditation, insight meditation, mental health, measurement, equanimity