Institutionally, the accounting profession faces crises of public confidence which led the Cohen Commission to conclude that significant gaps exist between public expectations and audit performance. That commission placed primary responsibility for narrowing those gaps upon the accounting profession. This dissertation provides evidence of those gaps and suggests a methodology which facilitates systematic investigation of cognitive factors which mediate those gaps. / This study has the dual purpose of documenting expectations gaps empirically and investigating information-processing factors which mediate creation of these gaps. Ninety-two Certified Public Accountants (CPA'S) and 55 small business owners (SBO's) were provided with a series of eight caselets (hypothetical fact situations), seven of which described audit failures and one of which described an audit success. Subjects allocated responsibility for caselet outcomes among characteristics of the auditors involved in the caselets (auditor ability and auditor effort) and characteristics of the caselet environment (task difficulty and luck). Expectations gaps emerged in that the SBO sample assigned more responsibility to auditor characteristics than the CPA sample. / Psychologists concerned with causal judgment processes posit that three types of information are useful to arrive at informed judgments of responsibility. These types of information were systematically varied in a repeated-measures design and included (1) information about the consistency with which the described auditors failed (succeeded) in previous audits, (2) information about the degree of consensus among other auditors about the appropriateness of the audit procedures employed in the caselets, and (3) information about the distinctiveness, or uniqueness, of the type of audit activity described in the caselets. / Consistent with the predictions of prior psychological research, multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) revealed that subjects processed these three types of information in a manner such that strong associations emerged between information inputs and responsibility judgment outputs. Auditors were held most responsible for caselet outcomes when their behavior was consistent across audits, when they did not use audit procedures that were commonly used by other auditors, and when the auditing task described was routine. / In addition to differences in the level of responsibility the two samples assigned to the auditors, the samples differed in their responsiveness to the information stimuli. The CPA sample relied quite heavily upon information about consensus among auditors over the procedures employed. Because of the similarity between consensus information and information about general acceptance, it was inferred that CPA's place too much reliance upon general acceptance as a standard of responsible audit performance. / From these analyses, projections were that: (1) expectations gaps exist, (2) the information-processing hypotheses of psychological research into causal judgment can predict these gaps across a variety of audit contexts, and (3) attempts to narrow expectations gaps should consider the likelihood that the public may not consider general acceptance as a particularly important defense of audit performance. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 41-03, Section: A, page: 1109. / Thesis (D.B.A.)--The Florida State University, 1980.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74095 |
| Contributors | ARRINGTON, CECIL EDWARD., The Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 242 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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