AFFINITY ANALYSIS

A technique called affinity analysis was developed in the 1960s by Japanese anthropologist Kawakita Jiro. When he was working in the field he made detailed notes of all his observations for later study. But this meant that he would be faced with large amounts of information in the future. In order to simplify the process he developed a new method for handling the information which he called the KJ method. The idea behind the method was to be able to go through large amounts of information in an efficient way and, at the same time, to establish groupings of the information. The method was later generalized and called the affinity method.

For the modern business person the affinity analysis is an efficient and creative way to gather and organize large amounts of qualitative information for the solution of a given problem. The procedure is described in Figure 8.4 below.

8.2.1 STAGES 1, 2, 3 AND 4 (IDEA GENERATION)

As mentioned above the idea of affinity analysis is to gather and combine large amounts of verbal information in order to find solutions to a specific problem. Hence the first two stages of the process will be to define the problem and to generate ideas. When defining the problem it is very important to reach consensus about the words that you are going to use. There must be absolutely no doubt about the issue under discussion because if this is the case it may later on be very difficult to use the results. The generation of ideas will follows the traditional guidelines of brainstorming, structured or unstructured, with no criticism of ideas whatsoever.

Each idea is written down on a small card or a Post-it note and placed randomly on the centre of the table where everybody can see it.

Fig. 8.4 Procedure for affinity diagram.

8.2.2 STAGES 5, 6 AND 7 (IDEA GROUPING AND PRESENTATION) After generation of the ideas the grouping session starts. The idea is to arrange the cards in related groupings. This grouping is done by the entire team and it takes place in silence. In practice the team members start the grouping by picking out cards that they think are closely related and then placing these at one side of the table or wall, wherever the session takes place. Eventually groups of cards appear and the grouping process continues until all team members are satisfied with the grouping. If a member is not satisfied he simply moves a card from an existing group to another which he finds more appropriate. Sometimes a card keeps moving from one group to another. In such a case it is a good idea to break the silence and discuss the actual meaning of the wording on the card. When a card keeps moving the usual reason is that the wording on the card is unclear or equivocable.

After the grouping has come to an end it is time to break the silence. Now the team discusses the groups and they decide upon headings for the groups. Finally an affinity diagram showing the entire grouping is drawn.

In our opinion this technique is very efficient in connection with problem solving. It may seem very simple and unsophisticated but experience shows that it may be of great help at all levels of management. Furthermore it is a very fast method due to the silence. Time is not spent in argument, instead you go directly to the point and solve the problem! As an example we report the results of a study made by a large supplier of food. He was interested in getting an idea of what the ordinary female consumer thought characterized the ordinary daily meal. He started the study by setting up two focus groups each consisting of eight persons. The first group consisted of females below the age of 35 and the latter of females above 35. Within the groups the members were distributed according to occupation, education and family situation.

One of the exercises that the groups did was to use the affinity technique (after proper introduction to the technique) to define and group elements that they thought

characterized the daily meal. They followed the procedure given above and one of the results was the affinity diagram given in Figure 8.5 below.

The two groups came up with almost identical groupings which in itself is very interesting. The grouping given here is for the 35 4- team and the only difference between this one and the one given by the other team was that for the younger females the fatty content was moved from the healthy group to the quality group. For this team less fat meant higher quality. We believe that if the affinity technique had not been used we would never have discovered the difference—a difference which is actually very important that you communicate to your customers.

Fig. 8.5 Affinity diagram describing the daily

meal.