Abstract This paper reports the results of an empirical study in which ten audit partners, 11 audit seniors, and 11 auditing students completed 32 audit cases requiring materiality judgments. The findings show that, while focusing primarily upon "effect on net income," both auditing practitioners and students used contextual (nonfinancial) information in making the materiality judgments required by the experimental task. The audit seniors were found to closely resemble the audit partners in performance of the task. Students, on the other hand, lacking professional experience, performed quite differently than the auditors.
Krogstad et al. (Sat,) studied this question.