Ethics and Accounting Research: The Issue of Deception.

Many accounting studies use a behavioral paradigm as their underpinning. Clearly, both internal and external validity are necessary to make a behavioral accounting study useful for application. Until recently, there has been little concern in the accounting literature for how deception of research participants affects these two necessary conditions for usefulness (Lord 1992; Dopuch 1992; Gibbins 1992). This paper explains how we weighed the need for valid results against the ethical dilemma of using deception. In arriving at our decision to use deception, we review considerations about the importance of the research issue and the limited appropriate scientific methods available. We also review social science arguments that have been used to support the application of deceptive methods in other studies. By example, we show that two different scientific approaches resulted in completely different results. Notably, the actual behavior observed in the approach employing deception supported the theoretical hypothesis; the non-deception, opinion-based method did not. We believe that an understanding of the assessments we made in designing our study may be helpful to other researchers facing the same types of decisions. In addition, we hope our paper will stimulate discussion on appropriate and ethical procedures for research designs that include deception.