Measuring Progress in Ethical Diagnostic Capabilities

• In Event: Emerging Research Discussion Session I

Abstract

Much has been said about the need for ethics education in accounting, but we have little evidence to indicate whether we are making any progress. How can we tell whether our instruction has an effect on the student? There have been numerous attempts to measure aspects of ethical understanding. Some researchers have developed and deployed analytical instruments designed to suit the objectives of the instant research (for example, Shawver & Sennetti 2009), but most of those instruments appear to be used once and then retired when the research is completed, with only a few instances where longitudinal comparability has been addressed (e.g., Cohen Pant & Sharp 1993, 1995, 1996, 2001, Emerson & Conroy 2004). Other researchers use well-recognized instruments like the DIT (Rest 1979), but those instruments can be costly to use or not focused on the problem under study. Shaub (1994) cautions against using a single-score measure like the DIT to measure auditors’ ethics. Published research also suffers from issues related to limited sample size and limited geographic distribution of the population sampled.
This paper describes an action research project to measure progress in ethical diagnostic capabilities in accounting education that will address the challenges mentioned above. A broadly-distributed project to evaluate attitudes towards ethical issues early in the educational process followed by evaluation after instruction can measure progress informed by education, and will provide interesting data for analysis and follow-up to improve our ethics instruction. The project is intended to provide research tools to educators that they can use in improving their own ethics instruction, while collecting data that will be useful in baseline and longitudinal evaluation of ethics diagnostic capabilities.

Authors

• William Black, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

• Barbara Sumrall White, Huntingdon College