Accounting Students as Surrogates for Accounting Professionals When Studying Ethical Dilemmas: A Cautionary Note

A challenge in performing empirical research isdetermining appropriate research subjects.Laboratory experiments are noted for their useof student subjects. The issue of interest inthis research is whether student subjectsrespond to a contextual ethical dilemma in thesame manner as working professionals.An experiment was conducted with 110 studentsand 169 experienced accounting practitioners,who are CPAs, utilizing six different financialreporting dilemmas. Students were assigned tothree different organizational categories interms of tone at the top – ethical, not ethicaland neutral. Experienced accountingpractitioners provided information about theperceived tone at the top in their ownorganizations using a questionnaire. The t-tests disclose significant differencesbetween CPAs and students for each of the sixdilemmas at the p < 0.001 level.