Using Psychology Theories in Archival Financial Accounting Research  

Oleh:

Koonce, Lisa ; Mercer, Molly

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Accounting Literature vol. 2005 no. 24 (2005), page 175-214.
Topik: Public Sector Accounting; PSA; Cognitive Psychology; Social Psychology; Financial Accounting Research
Fulltext: JAL 05 24 175.pdf (2.53MB)

Isi artikel

Our paper provides a number of examples of how psychology theories can help archival researchers by allowing for different and/or more specific predictions in many areas of financial accounting research. Our goal is to demonstrate how psychology theories can be useful to archival researchers and, thus, to prompt archival research on both these and other financial accounting issues. To accomplish this, we first identify and briefly review select theories from the two areas of psychology that we judge as particularly relevant to financial accounting researchers - cognitive psychology and social psychology. Pinpointing the relevant areas is necessary, as psychology is a large, diverse field with many areas not directly applicable to accounting. Theories from cognitive and social psychology address a number of issues relevant to accounting, such as how people search for new information (e.g., Koehler [1996]), make inferences (e.g., Kelley [1972]), evaluate risky alternatives (e.g., Kahneman and Tversky [1979]), and develop expertise (e.g., Fel-tovich et al. [1997a]). This review provides an overview of the types of insights that can be drawn from psychology research. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes some key findings and theories from two areas of psychology that are particularly relevant to financial accounting. Our discussion in this section relies largely on citations to the original psychology research where these theories were developed in order to provide the best description of the basic psychological findings without introducing complexities from a particular applied setting.4 Section 3 articulates circumstances where archival researchers can productively use these theories in their research, providing a number of specific examples across a variety of financial accounting contexts. Section 4 summarizes and discusses limitations to the use of psychology theories in archival financial accounting research.

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