A theory of reasoned action model of accounting students' career choice in public accounting practices in the post‐Enron
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine factors influencing the accounting students' career choice in public accounting practices. Design/methodology/approach Multinomial logistic regression is used to analyze survey data of 214 accounting students from three universities in Hong Kong. Three dependent variables are: pursue a career in public accounting (CPA); general accounting; and a non‐accounting careers. Findings Results support the TRA model. The two constructs in the model – “intrinsic factors” (attitude toward the behavior) and “parental influence” (subjective norm), make significant and independent contributions to predicting the career choice of accounting students. Results indicate that “intrinsic factors” and “parental influence” have significant influence on the decision whether to select a CPA career. This result is not consistent with the New Zealand study and the Canadian study. Neither the “financial rewards factor” nor the “high school accounting” factor is an influencing factor on the career choice in the post‐Enron. This result is also in contrast to the findings of the literature in the pre‐Enron. The fact that financial rewards variable has no influence on career choice is an interesting finding. There may be a “cultural” factor in Hong Kong linked to the prestige of professions that may outweigh the financial rewards factor. “Flexibility of career options” factor has the highest influencing power among all the variables, possibly influenced by the US Sarbanes Oxley enactments that result in a buoyant job market, and China's convergence with the International Financial Reporting Standards in 2007. Females dominate over males in entering the CPA career or general accounting career. Research limitations/implications The support of the TRA model in this paper could be applied as a useful theoretical framework to examine other accounting areas. Practical implications The Hong Kong Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the Big 4 firms should exercise more efforts to improve the traditional accountants' negative image as boring and methodical so as to attract bright students to enter the accounting profession. Originality/value The lack of using a theoretical model and prior studies' limitations make any inferences drawn and generalizations difficult. This paper represents the first to the author's knowledge to use the theory of reasoned action (TRA) model from the social psychological literature to examine the issues into the Hong Kong environment.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".