Using affinity diagramming to generate a codebook: a case study on young military veterans and community reintegration

Use of a codebook to categorize meaning units is a well-known research strategy in qualitative inquiry. However, methodology for the creation of a codebook in practice is not standardized, and specific guidance for codebook ideation is sometimes unclear, especially to novice qualitative researchers. This article describes the procedure that was utilized to create a codebook, which adapted an affinity diagram methodology (Scupin, 1997), an approach used in user-centered design. For this research, affinity diagramming was applied to a method outlined by Kurasaki (2000) for codebook ideation. Annotations of a subset of military veterans’ transcripts were utilized in congruence with affinity diagramming to create a codebook to categorize the phenomenon of reintegration into the civilian community after service (Haskins Lisle, 2017). This method could be useful in exploratory research that utilizes a codebook generated in vivo from annotations, especially for novice researchers who are overwhelmed by the codebook creation phase.