Online Instrument Delivery and Participant Recruitment Services: Emerging Opportunities for Behavioral Accounting Research

TLDR

Behavioral accounting research has been limited by difficulty in accessing externally valid participants. This paper introduces two innovative approaches to address participant access challenges in behavioral accounting research. The authors review online instrument delivery and participant recruitment services—SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, MTurk, and others—evaluating them on cost, flexibility, and access to target populations.

Abstract

ABSTRACT Behavioral accounting researchers have historically been constrained in their ability to reach externally valid research participants. The purpose of this paper is to familiarize researchers with two relatively new and innovative ways to overcome this issue. First, this paper discusses two online instrument delivery services provided by SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics that can be used to distribute experimental materials to geographically distributed participants quickly and inexpensively. Second, it reviews a number of participant recruitment services that behavioral accounting researchers can use to identify and recruit externally valid research participants. Specifically, this paper discusses commercial participant recruitment services provided by SurveyMonkey Audience, Qualtrics, Amazon's Mechanical Turk, and other commercial firms, as well as several non-commercial participant recruitment services associated with industry and professional organizations. Each service is evaluated against three criteria that are important to behavioral accounting researchers: (1) cost, (2) flexibility, and (3) access to populations of interest.