Attitudes of Accounting Students Towards Ethics and Ethics Education

Stephanie Venter () and Vanessa Dyk ()
Additional contact information
Stephanie Venter: University of Johannesburg
Vanessa Dyk: University of Johannesburg

A chapter in Towards Digitally Transforming Accounting and Business Processes, 2024, pp 443-467 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The cost of unethical behaviour in both the private and public sectors is astronomical. In South Africa, the Auditor-General and accounting professional bodies have received widespread public criticism for failing to uphold their duty to protect stakeholders and the economy from the impact of these ethical failures. Such failures are exacerbated by the mismatch between the rapid advances in technology and the slow pace of regulation. The literature makes clear how crucial and complex ethics are and that effective ethics education is critical to curb unethical behaviour. The South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA) has charged higher education institutions with the duty of providing effective ethics education as part of accounting education. Attitudes towards a field of study show a strong correlation with academic performance and future behaviours. Consequently, negative attitudes towards ethics and ethics education carry the risk of poor engagement with content and may weaken the intended impact of the educational initiative. The objective of this study is to examine accounting students’ attitudes to ethics and ethics education through a quantitative approach. Thus, a survey was administered to accounting students at a school with SAICA accreditation. The results reveal that the participants’ interest in ethics, and their conversational engagement with it, are strong. The participants reported a high level of comfort, enjoyment, and belief in ethics education. Furthermore, the analysis revealed that the participants had a positive attitude towards ethics and ethics education, derived from the strong sense of significance and relevance they accorded to ethics.

Keywords: Attitudes to learning; Business ethics; Ethics; Ethics education; Ethics in accounting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:prbchp:978-3-031-46177-4_24

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783031461774

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-46177-4_24

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().