Committee on Research Methodology in Accounting.

Abstract The article highlights the report of the Committee on Research Methodology in Accounting of the American Accounting Association. The charge to this committee is to prepare a report which identifies, explains, and illustrates the various methodological approaches which are appropriate for research in accounting. A glance at the accounting literature reveals that there has been a broadening of what accountants perceive to be appropriate research questions. Since technology is a crucial factor in the establishment of a communication system, in addition to the fact that the computer is a powerful research tool, computer science is pertinent. It is in the pursuit of internal validity that experimenters attempt to control or offset the extraneous variables so that these variables will not influence the outcome of the experiment. The fundamental difficulty is that a lot of the research involved deals with improvements in decision making. This is an unstructured, complex task, and it is extremely hard to assess the impact of a particular model on the decisions made by managers. There is no other experimental vehicle which has quite this same capability of monitoring a human engaged in complex problem solving. Ready access to the decision process has tremendous power in helping us look for cause and effect relationships between what the user sees in his accounting information and the actions he takes with that information.