Prior to the deployment of the KPI 1.0, initial qualitative work mapped out a theory of motivations to participate in kink.  Qualitative work consisted of open-ended responses to the local community, soliciations for feedback on Fetlife posts, and targeted follow-up items on kink-friendly Discord servers.  The eight "perspectives" of that structure formed the basis of the KPI 1.0 as well as marked the first initial work of the Kink Perspectives Project.

The original version of the KPI was a Google Form that contained 18 demographic items, 96 scaled items each mapped to one of eight constructs in the theoretical model, and a page of open-ended responses.  Click on the link above for a small portion of the analysis of the KPI 1.0.  Full details will be available in the forthcoming book.

The second version of the KPI was a 90-item questionnaire aligned with 8 perspectives.  Each item loaded on one construct.  It contained, at any time, a rotating bank of 10 unscored "test" items meant to develop the items for each perspective with the highest levels of discrimination and clearest mapping to each individual construct.  Psychometric information on the dataset is available in the book.

The current version (KPI 3) is deployed as web-accessible application, and users can instantly get their perspective profile from the application itself, displayed as a radar chart.  The KPI 3 also switched to a z-score reporting system, using the corpus of data from the KPI 2 as the baseline.  The scale has been reduced to 60 items with the best available psychometric information.  The demographics page has been slightly adjusted to include more questions of interest.