An International Meeting of the American Accounting Association American Accounting Association 2006 Annual Meeting August 6–9, 2006 Washington, D.C.

Robert L Peace
North Carolina State University

Abstract: This is a study to investigate whether there is a difference in the level of moral development among Master of Accounting (MAC)students at two state universities in the US. The graduates of the masters' degree programs at both universities are recruited and employed primarily by Big 4, global public accounting firms. The study used Defining Issues Test 2, a more recently developed instrument that is considered to produce slightly stronger trends on validity and reliability than DIT-1. Study results indicate that scores measuring post-conventional moral reasoning for MAC students with undergraduate accounting degrees were significantly below the scores for MAC students with an undergraduate degrees in liberal arts. A comparison of men with women in the study found very little statistical difference, and this contrasts with a large number of prior studies that have women consistently achieving higher moral development scores than men. acoring

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