HCBE Theses and Dissertations

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Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Dissertation - NSU Access Only

Degree Name

Doctor of Business Administration (DBA)

Department

H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship

Advisor

Bahaudin Mujtaba

Committee Member

Frank Cavico

Committee Member

Albert Williams

Abstract

The Financial Crisis of 2007-2010 is the latest of a cycle of scandals that involved questionable ethics in accountants. The costs were extraordinarily large this time. Once again there is a focus on the ethical training of the future accounting professionals, accounting instructors, and business leaders. Traditional methods have not been successful. Service-learning is presented as an alternative. In this study, community service hours are used as a proxy for the "service" component of service-learning. This research extends the research of Weber and Glyptis (2000) by examining the relationship between community service hours and ethical reasoning capabilities. Since the most community service studies in business education have been descriptive rather than empirical (Sneider, Gillmor, & Rabinowicz, 2011), this study also adds to the paucity of empirical data on the impact of community service on students.

Their research provided evidence that students participating in community service activities scored higher DIT scores than students who did not. This study explores the relationship between DIT scores and hours of community service, hours of accounting-related community service hours, age, gender, number of accounting courses, and ethics education. The study found a strong relationship between the variables, community service hours, accounting-related community service hours, and DIT scores. There was also a relationship between DIT scores and gender as well as previous ethics education. No relationship was found between DIT scores and age and the number of accounting courses taken. The Defining Issues Test (DIT) was used to measure the ethical reasoning capabilities of 233 accounting students in several colleges in the state of Georgia.

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