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 current version of the KPI is a 90-item questionnaire aligned with 8 perspectives. Each item loads on one construct. It contains, 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 will be available when data collection for the KPI 2 has concluded.

When the KPI 2 reaches a sufficient level of responses, development of the KPI 3 will begin. This will be the "final" version (pending further tweaks and minor wording changes). The KPI 3 will be the first version of the instrument to feature cross-loading of items and item weights.