Publications
Publications
- Journal of Accounting Research
Gathering Data for Archival, Field, Survey, and Experimental Accounting Research
By: Robert Bloomfield, Mark W. Nelson and Eugene F. Soltes
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.