Methodology

How this assessment works

Most free typing tests take your answers and hand back a label with no explanation. This one is built on the opposite premise: you should be able to see how your result was produced from your own responses.

The instrument

The assessment presents 108 first-person statements — twelve for each of the nine Enneagram types — rated on a five-point agreement scale (Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree). Statements are presented in a fixed mixed order so that consecutive items don't cluster by type. Items are written to target each type's characteristic motivational patterns: core fears, core desires, attentional fixations, and habitual strategies.

Scoring

Each type's raw score is the sum of your ratings on its twelve items, giving a range of 12–60 per type. Scores are also shown as percentages of that range. From the nine scores, three things are derived:

• Core type — the highest-scoring of the nine types.
• Wing — whichever of your core type's two neighbors on the enneagram circle scores higher. If they tie exactly, no wing is reported.
• Tritype — your highest-scoring type within each of the three centers of intelligence: Body (8, 9, 1), Heart (2, 3, 4), and Head (5, 6, 7), ordered with your core type's center first.

Seeing your own evidence

On your results page, every one of the nine type scores can be expanded to show the exact statements that compose it, alongside your answer to each. Nothing about your result is hidden from you. (What we don't publish is the machine-readable item-to-type scoring key as a bulk download — a measure that protects the instrument's integrity, not your visibility into your own result.)

Versioning

The question set is versioned. Your results are permanently stamped with the version that produced them and are never retroactively recalculated. When the item pool is revised, comparisons across versions are flagged as such.

Honest limits

This is a free self-report assessment, and a starting point rather than a verdict. It has not been validated as a peer-reviewed psychometric scale. Self-report instruments are sensitive to mood, self-knowledge, and how candidly you answer. Treat your result as a well-organized hypothesis about your motivational patterns — one you can examine directly, item by item — and weigh it against your own self-observation.

Research

If you opt in on your results page, an anonymous snapshot of your responses and scores is donated toward improving the instrument — item analysis, reliability checks, and refinement of the question pool. Donation is strictly optional, contains nothing identifying, and can be revoked at any time. See the privacy policy for the precise contents of a donation.