ABSTRACT
The need to link the academic accounting research to issues of short, medium and long-term interest to diverse academic and practice audiences has led to calls to ground our research deeper into an understanding of practice concerns. We argue that behavioural accounting experimental researchers (BAR researchers) are particularly well positioned to answer this call by carrying out research that directly studies the experiences of practitioners. As we see it, BAR researchers develop five key competencies (among others) through their education and research that can be leveraged to carry out experience-based (or experiential) research. These competencies are: familiarity with a broad range of theories, close engagement with practice, selection of appropriate participants, focus on ex ante instrument design and careful measurement of underlying constructs. We argue that these five competencies enable BAR researchers to readily carry out experiential survey and qualitative interview-based field studies that facilitate systematic development of theory-based (or informed) evidence about current accounting practices. We elaborate on these two experiential research methods and demonstrate how each of BAR researchers’ key competencies equips them to employ these methods. Our hope is that BAR researchers, with their competitive advantage over other accounting researchers, will take on the challenge of utilizing these diverse research methods to develop more impactful, practically oriented accounting research.
