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  • Journal of Accounting Research

Gathering Data for Archival, Field, Survey, and Experimental Accounting Research

By: Robert Bloomfield, Mark W. Nelson and Eugene F. Soltes
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Abstract

In the published proceedings of the first Journal of Accounting Research Conference, Vatter (1966) lamented that “Gathering direct and original facts is a tedious and difficult task, and it is not surprising that such work is avoided.” For the 50th JAR Conference, we introduce a framework to help researchers understand the complementary value of seven empirical methods that gather data in different ways: pre-structured archives, unstructured (“hand-collected”) archives, field studies, field experiments, surveys, laboratory studies, and laboratory experiments. The framework spells out five goals of an empirical literature and defines the seven methods according to researchers’ choices with respect to five data gathering tasks. We use the framework and examples of successful research studies in the financial reporting literature to clarify how data-gathering choices affect a study’s ability to achieve its goals and conclude by showing how the complementary nature of different methods allows researchers to build a literature more effectively than they could with less diverse approaches to gathering data.

Keywords

Archival; Data; Experiment; Empirical Methods; Field Study; Analytics and Data Science; Surveys; Financial Reporting

Citation

Bloomfield, Robert, Mark W. Nelson, and Eugene F. Soltes. "Gathering Data for Archival, Field, Survey, and Experimental Accounting Research." Journal of Accounting Research 54, no. 2 (May 2016): 341–395.
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About The Author

Eugene F. Soltes

Accounting and Management
→More Publications

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More from the Authors
  • What Makes Managers’ Private Disclosures Informative? Evidence from Professional Investors By: Michael Durney, Hoyoun Kyung, Jihwon Park and Eugene F. Soltes
  • Corporate Misconduct’s Relevance to Society through Everyday Misconduct By: Eugene Soltes
  • Corporate Criminal Investigations and Prosecutions By: Leo R. Tsao, Daniel S. Kahn and Eugene F. Soltes
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