Designing a questionnaire is a very time-consuming and costly task when developing a study. In most cases questionnaires are created in a paper-based form. However, this paper-based approach leaves less scope for interaction with the participant. Moreover, data collection and subsequent evaluation is very cumbersome because all data has to be transferred manually to electronic worksheets. To deal with these issues, a concept for the development of an electronic questionnaire application is presented to solve the aforementioned problems. Thereby, a generic approach is introduced.
In general, questions and answers are determined using an XML document. In addition, a generic XML schema is provided to validate the specified questionnaires during the creation phase. When enacting such a questionnaire, user interface elements (like textfields, checkboxes, radiobuttons or sliders) are automatically generated by the application itself. Note, that no further programming skills are needed. Therefore, the process of development and enactment of questionnaires is very comfortable.
The presentation closes with a live demonstration. Thereby, a possible scenario for the utilization of the electronic questionnaire application is presented. This shall clarify the general steps of developing, deploying, enacting and processing the electronic questionnaire.