A Generic Approach for Developing and Executing Electronic Questionnaires on the iOS Platform

The creation of questionnaires is a very time-consuming and costly task when developing a study. In most cases they are created in a paper-based form. However, this paper-based approach leaves less scope for interaction with the participant to motivate them when filling in the questionnaire. 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, this master’s thesis presents a concept and implementation of an electronic questionnaire application to solve the mentioned problems. Thereby, different generic approaches are introduced and compared with each other. 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. When running such a questionnaire, user interface elements like textfields, checkboxes, radiobuttons or sliders are automatically generated by the application. Moreover, the results of completed questionnaires can be viewed and exported for later analysis.

Requirements and styleguides for an iOS specific application development are determined an discussed. The theoretical characterization ends in a practical part whereby a possible scenario for the utilization of the electronic questionnaire application is shown. In addition, the steps to create, deploy and enact such an electronic questionnaire are discussed.