A pandemic era study of accounting doctoral students

ABSTRACT

In this study, we explore how accounting doctoral students fared during the pandemic. We survey accounting doctoral students from Canada and the United States and perform quantitative and qualitative analyses of the responses. We situate our research within social cognitive theory, and our findings suggest that accounting doctoral students experienced some stress and burnout due to exhaustion. Most students coped using healthy strategies; however, we highlight correlations between stress and burnout for those who didn’t. We also propose a series of possible interventions that can be adopted to support retention and future recruitment efforts. Some of these interventions reflect long-standing challenges faced by accounting doctoral students, such as increasing financial aid and having better-supported faculty to supervise students; however, many new challenges emerged because of shifts in doctoral studies during the pandemic and will require more innovative solutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Accounting doctoral students
• COVID-19 pandemic
• mental health and well-being
• recruiting and retention

JEL CLASSIFICATIONS:

• A20: A23

Acknowledgements

We thank the Editor (Dr. Barbara Flood) and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. We acknowledge the financial support provided by the Canadian Academic Accounting Association (CAAA)-Deloitte Fund for Accounting Research. Thanks to Devan Mescall (moderator) and participants at the 2022 CAAA Annual Conference, and participants at the University of Guelph Department of Management Lunchtime Seminar Series for their comments and feedback. We are also grateful for the research assistance provided by Nicole Bena and Laura Fallowfield and the accounting doctoral students who participated in our study.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Our study focuses on accounting doctoral students, which includes those in Ph.D. and DBA programs.

2 Three professors and one graduate student reviewed the survey during the pilot testing. Two of the professors who pilot tested the survey specialized in human resources to provide a different perspective than accounting faculty.

3 Most of the changes resulting from the pilot testing were grammatical and stylistic in nature.

4 All participants provided their informed consent before starting our survey.

5 For example, Plumlee et al. (2006) reported a response rate of 42.3%, while Brink et al. (2012) reported a response rate of 58.96%.

6 The mean difference of 12% between the average usage of positive and negative coping strategies was statistically significant based on a two-tailed t-test (p = 0.02).

7 Approximately 11% of the responses suggested no expectation of long-term career impacts due to the pandemic.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Canadian Academic Accounting Association (CAAA)-Deloitte Fund for Accounting Research.