Questionnaires for the Masses: Designing Negotiation Tools that Reveal What Matters

Live Session Info & Registration

🗓️ October 18th, 18:00 EST
📍Online Class | Recorded, available for 30 days
🔗 The link is shared 24h prior to the class, to the email you register with

Pre-requisites & Materials:

• Something to write with and on.
• Basic familiarity with kink dynamics, consent frameworks, and scene negotiation is assumed.

About the class:

“Statistics are like a Bikini bathing suit. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.”, Some White Men Who Apparently Made The Sun Rise, circa 1951.
Jokes aside,
What happens when we try to understand people and negotiate “in paper”? Through questions, scales, surveys and questionnaires?

We often embark to discover what we feel is but a “simple”, yet essential relational answer: What do they need? What do they think? What matters to them?

But people are not simple equations— we are complex universes, and the tools we use to understand our needs, wants and intentions quietly shape the answers we get.

In this hands-on seminar, we will explore the art and science of designing questionnaires, research and negotiation tools that actually reveal something meaningful.

Drawing from epidemiology, psychology and pedagogy, we’ll look at how questions can become tools for research, communication, negotiation and decision-making—and where they can go wonderfully right or spectacularly wrong.

We’ll ask:

• Why do we need negotiation and research tools in the first place
• Where do questionnaires fail, and what makes them fail?
• What makes a tool genuinely useful rather than merely statistically impressive?
• Where do we begin when we want to measure something messy, subjective or deeply human?
• What belongs in a good questionnaire, and what absolutely doesn’t?
• How do we balance clarity, efficiency, depth and nuance?
• Can a questionnaire be fun to use and fun to build while still producing meaningful results?
• How do we design tools that work across differences in culture, language, education, personality and neurotype?
• And perhaps most importantly: what are the limits of what a questionnaire can ever tell us?

About Your Facilitator:

Sylvastra is a kink-aware mental health counselor and educator with over ten years of professional experience. Her work focuses on the integration of psychological support, embodied awareness, and ethical, consent-based approaches within therapeutic and educational settings.

She holds a Master’s degree in Health Promotion and Education, with academic training grounded in public health, pedagogy, and psychosocial wellbeing. Her interdisciplinary background also includes a degree in Integrative Mental Health Counselling and a degree in Agricultural Biotechnology, shaping a holistic, systems-oriented perspective on human health, behavior, and resilience.

Sylvastra’s educational work includes teaching Esoteric Energy Healing, and she is a member of INEH. Her approach emphasizes trauma-aware frameworks, reflective practice, and responsible engagement across psychological and esoteric disciplines.