Measuring the Ethical Awareness and Ethical Orientation of Canadian Auditors.

This paper relates the multidimensional ethics scale and factor analysis method of Reidenbach and Robin (1990), Flory et al. (1992) and Cohen et al. (1993) to Rest's (1986) four-component model of ethical decision-making. We believe that the scale items and factor scores measure moral awareness, the first of Rest's four components. Using a sample of Canadian auditing professionals, we demonstrate how the regression coefficient of ethical evaluation on these individual factor scores measures respondents' ethical evaluation of the importance of various criteria, which corresponds to Rest's second component (making a moral judgment), and that the importance and awareness measures differ. We believe that this measure of importance is related to moral development, and therefore could be related to the Defining Issues Test, (a commonly used measure of moral development in accounting ethics research). We suggest that these previously independent approaches to measuring individual morality could be integrated in future studies. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for behavioral accounting ethics research.