Indeks-Rating: Data Collection Software for Rating/Association Tasks

Indeks-Rating is a web-based data collection application developed for Subproject B of IndeKS, an FWF-funded research project on indexicality and speaker knowledge. The software implements a rating study in which participants evaluate German communication verbs with respect to their association with different types of communication situations.

Study design: Participants are presented with individual verbs and asked to rate — on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from "not at all" to "very strongly" — how strongly they associate the use of each word with one of four situation types: (1) specific, typical communication situations, (2) private situations, (3) institutional situations, or (4) public situations. An optional fifth task invites participants to describe a situation in which the word would be used in free text. Three worked examples at the beginning of each session calibrate participants' understanding of the scale. In addition to the rating, participants can flag individual words as unknown, and response latency (reaction time in milliseconds) is recorded for every item. A demographic questionnaire covering age, gender, education, occupational background, language history, and dialect usage is collected at the end of each session.

Technical design: The application automatically distributes participants in a balanced manner across ten word lists and up to four active question types, ensuring even coverage of all list–question combinations. It is designed for use with the Prolific crowdsourcing platform, but runs independently without Prolific integration as well. Results are stored server-side as individual JSON files per session, enriched with session metadata (timestamps, duration, assigned list, and question type). The backend is built with Java 25 and Spring Boot 4, using Spring Data JDBC for database access and a plain HTML/CSS/JavaScript frontend with no external framework dependencies. Both an in-memory H2 database (development) and any JDBC-compatible relational database (production) are supported.

License: MIT License