In contrast to hierarchical methods, the non hierarchical procedure does not involve the construction of a treelike structure, where the results at an earlier stage are always nested within the results of a later stage. Instead, objects may be
reassigned if they are closer to another cluster than the one originally assigned (Hair et al., 1998).
Furthermore, unlike hierarchical methods, the number of clusters must be known a priori. As mentioned above, in this study the results from the hierarchical clustering procedure were used to establish the number of clusters and the profile of
cluster centers for the non hierarchical procedure.