Can an understanding of the accounting function assist with breaking stereotypes?

ABSTRACT

Recruiting talented individuals to the accounting profession has long been a concern of accounting educators, practitioners, and professional accounting associations in both developing and developed countries. In this exploratory study, we examine whether providing non-business college students with a basic knowledge of accounting principles and their application influences their perceptions of the accounting profession and their accounting self-efficacy. Our results indicate that providing non-business college students with a basic knowledge of the accounting function helps to break stereotypes of the accounting profession and serves to make non-business students more confident they could succeed in accounting, thereby providing evidence of a mechanism that may be useful in future recruiting efforts.

KEYWORDS:

• Accounting self-efficacy
• accounting stereotypes
• perceptions of the accounting profession
• recruitment

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Kevin Agnew, Allen Blay, Lee Kersting, Pat Nickinson, Jackie Reck, and workshop participants at the American Accounting Association Southeast Regional Conference and at the American Accounting Association Conference on Teaching and Learning in Accounting for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Originally 77 students were enrolled in this class and all took the pretest. Of the 77 students, three dropped the course leaving us with 74 observations for purposes of this study. Institutional Review Board approval with respect to the use of human subjects was obtained.

2 On a 5-point scale (1 to 5, with endpoints labeled ‘no interest’ and ‘a great deal of interest,’ respectively), the participants’ mean response when asked to indicate their level of interest in accounting was 2.3 at the beginning of the semester.

3 A 9-point Likert scale was used to provide participants with sufficient choice to express their opinions (Preston & Colman, 2000) and to avoid satisficing behavior (Matell & Jacoby, 1972).