The Effect of Professional Context on Accounting Students' Moral Reasoning

Abstract

This study investigates whether the professional context of accounting ethical dilemmas influences accounting students' moral reasoning. In a between-subjects experiment, 101 accounting students from a large public AACSB-accredited university in the U.S. responded to four ethical dilemmas faced by either auditors or corporate accountants designed to measure their deliberative moral reasoning. As expected, students in the audit condition exhibited significantly higher deliberative moral reasoning than students in the corporate accounting condition. Supplemental analysis indicates this finding is robust to commonly influential demographic characteristics and perceptions about the current business environment. These results are consistent with accounting students having more audit-based ethical knowledge structures which do not flexibly transfer to resolving ethical issues in the corporate accounting context.

Educational Context: Preparing Accounting Students To Identify Ethical Dilemmas

“…Of the control variables, only work experience had a significant association to higher levels of moral reasoning (p = 0.008). Although Fleming et al (2009) found a significant positive association between years of accounting experience and moral reasoning, our results indicate that general work experience may be the influencing factor that affects moral reasoning. …”

“…The context in which the educational process is framed is important. In a study conducted by Fleming et al (2009), the ethical component of the educational process was grounded in an audit setting, which was compared to an educational process in a general accounting context. Similar to the studies listed above, the ethics content included in their auditing course may have led to a greater level of moral reasoning.…”

“…Future studies could extend this research to multiple semesters or throughout the academic career of accounting students to determine if accounting ethics education prepares students to make sound ethical judgments. Fleming et al (2009) suggest that "…traditional audit-based emphasis on ethics in accounting curricula may be inadequate for developing accounting students with ethical decision-making competencies required by the diverse segments of the accounting profession" (pg. 14).…”

Analytical procedures decision aids for generating explanations: Current state of theoretical development and implications of their use

“…They also had an average of 38.7 months of general business experience and 2.4 months of audit experience. Prior to this, research has used accounting students to proxy for entry-level accountants (e.g., Massey and Thorne 2006;Fleming et al, 2009), and the demographic characteristics of this sample suggest that the participants are reasonable proxies for entry-level auditors. Table 1 presents demographic data for the sample.…”

An Exploratory Study of Chinese Accounting Students’ and Auditors’ Audit-specific Ethical Reasoning

“…They provide evidence that the U.S. CPAs had significantly higher deliberative ethical reasoning than their Canadian counterparts. Fleming et al (2009) compared U.S. accounting students' deliberative ethical reasoning scores on the AEDI to a version of the instrument adapted for the management accounting context, and found deliberative ethical reasoning to be higher in the audit context. Also, of special significance to the current study, Ge and Thomas (2008) found that Canadian accounting students exhibited higher audit-specific deliberative ethical reasoning than Chinese accounting students.…”