Insights Regarding the Applicability of the Defining Issues Test to Advance Ethics Research with Accounting Students: A Meta-analytic Review

Abstract

Numerous researchers have investigated accounting students' levels of moral reasoning, ethical choice and judgment employing the Defining Issues Test (DIT) and using its P score as an indicator of moral reasoning. Not surprisingly, a number of DIT studies report conflicting results. Moreover, despite widespread use of the DIT, there is concern that it may not adequately measure all facets of ethical judgment (cf. Bailey et al., Behav Res Account 22(2):1-26, 2010). Thus, we endeavor to provide insight not only into the contradictory results but also about the applicability of the DIT for studying accounting students. To do so, we collect published and unpublished DIT studies employing accounting students as subjects and use metaanalysis to aggregate findings across these studies to quantify their results, examining commonly employed variables. We show significant relationships between P scores and some variables (length of professional experience, choice of major, political ideology, gender, GPA and education level) but not others (age). Further, our findings demonstrate that the DIT provides added insights when exploring questions of ethical choice, and ethics instruction, particularly when the instruction is embedded in an accounting course. Finally, we find that the level of DIT P scores reported in the studies relates to whether the study was published. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research.

Exploring and Comparing Cognitive Moral Reasoning of Millennials and Across Multiple Generations

“…Our data fail to support this directional prediction. However, our results show that overall Pscore is significantly higher with more work experience, providing additional support to the findings reported by Christensen et al ().…”

“…Interestingly, when we look at responses to the specific dilemmas regarding work experience level, our study shows that responses to the Evelyn dilemma show no significant relationship when comparing the subjects' moral reasoning level with work experience, while the responses to the Roger dilemma show a significant relationship but opposite from what we predicted. That is for the Roger dilemma, students with more work experience had higher Pscores, and providing support for the contrarian results found by Christensen et al (). This could be interpreted as another gender effect (e.g., the male oriented situation caused a different type of story pull than the female oriented dilemma), or it could also be simply a result of the lack of reliability of looking at this by specific dilemma.…”

“…Some studies have looked at differences between accounting students versus non‐accounting majors with mixed results (Icerman et al ). Jeffrey's () study and Christensen et al's () meta‐analysis found that accounting students have higher Pscores than non‐accounting students.…”

“…Business ethics and management scholars have generally found an impact of work experience upon an individuals' cognitive moral reasoning and ethical decision making. Christensen et al () report that individual's Pscores rose with more work experience, although others report a negative correlation.…”

Assessing the Job Selection Criteria of Accounting Students: A Normative Approach

“…These scandals have led to a loss of credibility of the accounting profession. Thus, universities have been heralded as the solution to this problem with the mandate of developing a new generation of morally competent accountants to repair the profession's damaged reputation (Christensen et al, 2016).…”