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Field research in auditing and corporate governance is relatively rare in accounting. However, well-done field research is highly valued, as exhibited by the awarding of two Notable Contribution to Auditing Literature Awards to field research in the first four years of the award's existence. Good field research requires skills in obtaining access to research sites, mailing lists, interviewing, administering surveys, and possessing other skills that are not normally the focus of a standard North American Ph.D. program. Consequently, the Research Committee gathered a panel of leading North American audit field researchers to discuss the pros and cons of carrying out such research, and how to acquire the requisite skills. The Panel was composed of Steve Salterio (Queen's University, Chair and case studies); Mike Gibbins (University of Alberta, theory building and survey methods and this year’s recipient of the Notable Contribution to Auditing Literature Award for his field research); Vaughan Radcliffe (University of Western Ontario, field research via observation); and Arnie Wright and Jeff Cohen (Boston College, interview methods, challenges of carrying out field research in the U.S.).
The panel members each provided either a one-page summary of their remarks or a PowerPoint® presentation summarizing their thoughts. Furthermore, the session chair had prepared a somewhat annotated bibliography of field research in auditing that had been published in the last 25 years. These presentations and the annotated bibliography will be posted to the Research page in the Audit Section’s website in the near future.
Below are our top-ten lessons to learn from the very thoughtful presentations. The presenters bear no responsibility for these choices and indeed may well disagree with one or more of them.
- Field-based research is a well-recognized research method in the social sciences—the earliest audit pieces were published in The Accounting Review in 1980. It was noted, however, that field-based auditing research is more commonly published outside of the U.S., in venues like Contemporary Accounting Research and Accounting, Organizations and Society. One panelist noted that, while it took a lot of work, our current section journal editor had finally accepted a field study for Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory!
- Field-based audit research allows the researcher to look into the "black box" of auditor/corporate governance participant behavior and to develop context-based theory that combines a deep understanding of the accounting context with economic, psychology and/or sociology theory(s).
- One of the primary challenges of field research in auditing is gaining access to appropriate participants or “field sites.” Appropriate participants and field sites should be chosen based on the research question being studied and the theoretical perspective being brought to bear by the researchers and should not be chosen based on the convenience of the researcher.
- Once appropriate participants and sites are identified, the researcher needs to find ways to obtain access to these people. Researchers need to think creatively about contacts that they may know who do the task being studied or who may be able to “open the door” to gain access to those people. Some ways to obtain access to these highly sought-after participants include:
- Working with senior practitioner-oriented co-author(s) who have credibility with and the trust of the sought-after participants.
- Contacting members of University/Business School/Department advisory boards who may be able to facilitate access.
- Interacting with prominent School alumni who may be able to facilitate access.
- Discussing access with key-firm contacts that fund named fellowships, professorships, or chairs.
- Seizing opportunities to gain access when they arise, such as interacting with other areas of the School or University, or by inviting a targeted participant to campus.
- Major methods used in field research include theoretical-based questionnaires, interviews, and observation of identified participants carrying out their tasks of interest.
- Panelists noted that theory-based questionnaires are not surveys about “life as an ‘X’ in general,” but inquiries of appropriate participants asking them to recall specific types of incidents they have encountered. The development of such a questionnaire should not be taken lightly. The time and effort put into developing and pretesting the questionnaire prior to distributing it is at least as extensive as preparing a well-tested experimental research instrument.
- Interviews are an important part of the development process for theory-based questionnaires as well as a research method. Panelists noted that the degree of interview structure (e.g., at one extreme a handful of open-ended questions, while at the other extreme using the same questions in the same order, and never deviating from the preplanned script) depended on how much is known about the context before the interviews commence. Panelists argued that, at most, interviews be semistructured where the interviewer has a list of questions to cover, but is free to probe deeper and reorder the questions based on how the interview progresses.
- Observation of targeted participants carrying out their tasks can provide rich and ecologically valid data once the participant grows used to having the researcher around. Panelists noted that this is very time-intensive research that can take months to complete and often requires the researcher to work the same hours as the participant so as not to miss key meetings or events. Furthermore, it was noted that often such observation was preceded and followed by interviews so that the researcher gained more insights into what the researcher was observing.
- Panelists made it clear that field researchers should carefully consider the issue of “triangulation,” which loosely translated into auditing language means “corroboration.” Combinations of interviews, archival data, questionnaires, and active or passive observation all provide possibilities for gaining corroborating evidence. Another approach is interviews with multiple informants, such as peers, subordinates, and superiors of the original targeted participant. All of these approaches provide assurance of good understanding not only to the researcher, but also to the reader of the research.
- Writing publishable papers from field-based research often requires more thought about presentation of the rich data set than is required for experimental or archival research. There tends to be less of a “cookie cutter” approach to writing field research. The Panelists noted that lack of such a “formula” does not mean that the methods employed to analyze the data are any less rigorous and encouraged field researchers to be more explicit about their analysis methods.
In the question-and-answer session that followed the formal presentations, the panel was split on the question of whether field-based research should be carried out as part of dissertation research. The two U.S.-based panelists cautioned strongly against doing so because of its lack of current acceptance as being rigorous research in some parts of the accounting academy and because of the time intensity of the research. The three Canadian-based panelists saw no problem with doing field research as part or all of a dissertation, citing the advantages of being able to study field research methodology via classes offered in sociology and/or anthropology departments and/or survey research centers while or before carrying out such research.
Finally, as noted previously, field research is a relatively more time-intensive method for gathering data. Hence, panelists were unanimous in their belief that wise users of this methodology do not carry out "one of" studies but view the field-based research as part of a series of studies that can include experiments and/or archival studies as well as using the rich set of field data to motivate more than a single paper.
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