The Development of Two Measures to Assess Accountants' Prescriptive and Deliberative Moral Reasoning.
本研究开发了两种针对会计师的测量工具，分别评估规范性道德推理和审慎性道德推理，发现会计师解决伦理困境时未达到其认知道德能力水平。
Abstract The purpose of this study is to develop two measures of accountants' prescriptive moral reasoning and deliberative moral reasoning. Past accounting ethics research adopting a cognitive-developmental perspective has focused on understanding the factors that promote accountants' development of cognitive moral capacity. Cognitive moral capacity does not necessarily correspond to the moral reasoning that accountants apply to the resolution of ethical dilemmas in the work place. Cognitive moral capacity describes the most sophisticated moral reasoning of which an individual is capable, whereas moral reasoning describes the actual cognitive assessment an individual applies to a particular ethical dilemma. There are two different types of moral reasoning: prescriptive reasoning and deliberative reasoning. As applied to the ethical decision process of accountants, prescriptive reasoning is analogous to an accountant's formulation of his or her professional judgment of the ideal resolution to an ethical dilemma, and deliberative reasoning is analogous to an accountant's intention to exercise professional judgment to resolve an ethical dilemma. To develop two accounting-specific measures of prescriptive and deliberative moral reasoning, the Defining Issues Test (DIT) was selected as a prototype. Professional accountants and experts were used to ensure the cases and scoring of the measures elicited a representative moral reasoning process of accountants, according to a cognitive-developmental perspective. The validity and reliability of the accounting-specific measures are comparable to that found in the BIT. The results of comparisons of scores on the accounting-specific measures to their DIT scores suggests that accountants do not resolve ethical dilemmas at their cognitive moral capacity. Thus, the accounting-specific measures of moral reasoning may be useful in future research to investigate factors and approaches that will encourage accountants to resolve ethical d...