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Mixed methods research in accounting
Edited by Jennifer Grafton and Anna M Lillis
I. Introduction
In this paper, we respond to the special call by Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management for articles exploring the ways in which qualitative and quantitative research methods can be combined to advance our understanding of accounting, management and organizations. The purposes of this paper are to:
- discuss the theoretical assumptions, qualities, problems and myopia of the dominating quantitative and qualitative approaches;
- describe the methodological lessons that we learned while conducting a series of longitudinal studies on the use and usefulness of a specialized balanced scorecard (BSC) ([34], [35] Malina and Selto, 2001, 2004, [36] Malina et al. , 2007); and
- encourage researchers to actually use multiple methods and sources of data to address the very many accounting phenomena that we still do not understand well.
[53] Zimmerman (2001) famously argued that accounting research is firmly wedded to economic theory, and by that many have inferred that he refers to classical microeconomic theory. Others ([22] Hopwood, 2002; [25] Ittner and Larcker, 2002; [32] Luft and Shields, 2002; and [33] Lukka and Mouritsen, 2002) responded vociferously that Zimmerman had overlooked the shortcomings of classic economic theory and the contributions of other behavioral theories to accounting research, such as social and cognitive psychology and sociology. We do not wish to continue this debate, but we observe that many accounting research papers currently seem devoid of axiomatic theory (unlike the heyday of the 1970s and 1980s) and are concerned with documenting empirical regularities. These efforts can be considered basic, pre-theory science, for which more-relevant tools seem to hold great promise for progress.
We echo [16] Euske et al. (2010) and deeply regret that accounting researchers have separated into methodological camps that do not communicate well to refine or modify our incomplete theories and knowledge of practice. Furthermore, we observe that the methodological camps are divided on the nature of the data which are worthy of rigorous examination. In accounting, research and researchers are stereotyped as either "number crunchers" or "navel gazers" (a.k.a. hard or squishy). We, as the accounting research community, have to face the fact that both numbers and words convey meaning and both are needed if we...