Concept and Implementation of a Rule Component Enabling Automatic Analysis of Process-Aware Questionnaires

Psychological studies are usually done using paper-based questionnaires, which are a common and inexpensive way to collect data. However, this leads to problems, especially with very big studies. Usually, the evaluation of thousands of completed questionnaires needs the help of a computer application. Therefore, the answers of the subjects need to be transfered manually to electronic worksheets (e.g., Microsoft Excel spreadsheets). The manual transfer opens the possibility for errors when transcribing handwritten text and causes a lot of work. One possible solution for this problem could be, to support the complete lifecycle of a questionnaire digitally. QuestionSys is one system aiming to provide a full digital support for domain experts and is developed at the University of Ulm. This thesis presents the theoretical concept and the development of the rule editor Questionrule. This component enables domain experts to create and manage rules, which are then used to evaluate a completed questionnaire. This has to be achieved in an abstract and intuitive way, as domain experts usually have little or no experience in boolean algebra. The different concepts and technologies that are used for the development of Questionrule, are presented in this thesis. In addition, an outline of other rule editors as well as a comparison is provided