On The Efficiency of Subject Surrogation in Accounting Research.

Abstract This article focuses on a study that examines issues related to the efficiency of subject surrogation in accounting research. Frequently, researchers interested in empirical research encounter difficulties in gathering data for two main reasons: the reluctance of many executives to provide the needed cooperation and the relatively high cost of conducting field studies. Consequently, accountants were persuaded to use students as substitutes for businessmen. This substitution has created a troublesome issue in research methodology: the reasonableness of subject surrogation in making decisions. Since the surrogation issue has not been settled and given a disposition towards a positivist's approach to surrogation, an attempt was made to evaluate the reliability of the surrogation process by analyzing differences in decisions rendered by actual decision-makers and by student surrogates in a particular decision situation. The article also consists of a report on the study and the results, the claimed contribution of which is supplying an additional evidence on the reasonableness of surrogation.