Computational KJ-Ho: An Analyst-Bias-Free Insight Extraction Framework from Large-Scale Qualitative Data Using Domain-Specialized LLMs

Abstract

The qualitative research methodologies that underpin consumer-insight generation - the KJ method, Grounded Theory, and Thematic Analysis - share a structural constraint: the cognitive processing capacity of the human analyst. Replication research further shows that conclusions vary substantially across analysts analyzing identical data (analyst bias). This paper proposes Computational KJ-Ho (the Kawakita Jiro method), a theoretical framework that computationally realizes the KJ method's epistemology - letting structure emerge from the data itself without imposing the analyst's preconceptions - an orientation we term "analyst-bias-free." The framework employs a domain-specialized LLM built through continued pre-training (CPT) on a marketing-research corpus and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on expert-curated insight pairs, organized as a three-layer architecture: data structuring, insight extraction, and strategy generation. Two preliminary studies in the Japanese marketing context support the necessity of CPT-based domain specialization. The paper makes five contributions: (1) a theoretical integration of the KJ method, Grounded Theory, and Peircean abduction into a single epistemological commitment of data-driven explanation generation; (2) a three-layer architecture leveraging domain-specialized embeddings for cross-interview analysis; (3) two novel evaluation metrics, InsightExtraction-F1 and MarketingQA; (4) explicit engagement with the WEIRD problem, centering a non-Western methodology; and (5) five practice-derived problem formulations from nearly three decades of marketing-research practice, translated into design requirements. The human analyst retains a supervisory role. This is a concept paper presented ahead of empirical validation.