Gathering Data for Archival, Field, Survey, and Experimental Accounting Research
提出一个框架，帮助研究者理解七种实证方法（如档案、实地、调查和实验）在数据收集上的互补价值，并用财务报告文献中的成功研究案例说明如何选择方法以实现研究目标。
ABSTRACT In the published proceedings of the first Journal of Accounting Research Conference, Vatter [1966] lamented that “Gathering direct and original facts is a tedious and difficult task, and it is not surprising that such work is avoided.” For the fiftieth JAR Conference, we introduce a framework to help researchers understand the complementary value of seven empirical methods that gather data in different ways: prestructured archives, unstructured (“hand‐collected”) archives, field studies, field experiments, surveys, laboratory studies, and laboratory experiments. The framework spells out five goals of an empirical literature and defines the seven methods according to researchers’ choices with respect to five data gathering tasks. We use the framework and examples of successful research studies in the financial reporting literature to clarify how data gathering choices affect a study's ability to achieve its goals, and conclude by showing how the complementary nature of different methods allows researchers to build a literature more effectively than they could with less diverse approaches to gathering data.