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Affinity mapping 0:48

A 48-second explainer of Affinity mapping, narrated over the same demo you can try yourself.

The Affinity mapping explainer. Prefer to do it yourself? Try the interactive demo.

Try the interactive Affinity mapping demo

What this video covers

Affinity mapping is a way of making sense of qualitative research by grouping individual observations - one per sticky note - into clusters of related ideas, then naming the themes that emerge. Instead of imposing categories up front, you let the structure rise from the data itself, turning a wall of scattered notes into a handful of patterns you can act on.

Scattered, the notes were just noise - a dozen unrelated gripes. Grouped, the same notes fell into two clear stories, and the theme names almost wrote themselves. That's affinity mapping: the pattern was always in the data; clustering is what makes it visible.

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