Personal values, moral development, and their relationship: A study of certified public accountants

This dissertation documents a study of the values, moral development, and values/moral development relationship of a sample of Certified Public Accountants (CPA). The moral development of the respondents was assessed with the Defining Issues Test (DIT) and the values of the respondents were assessed with the Rokeach Value Survey (RVS).; The value priorities of the respondents were found to be similar to those of CPAs in prior studies. The median test results found at least one of the RVS values significantly related to 13 of the 14 variables investigated: age, experience, gender, education, area of practice, social/political ideology, college ethics course, hours of ethics training, years since last ethics training, level in CPA firm, location of CPA firm, level in industry/government, size of CPA firm, and level in university. Further, a Musser and Orke (1992) typology analysis found gender specific value types and moral value scores of interest for several of the independent variables.; An unusually low level of moral development was found for these respondents: the mean DIT P score of 33.53 was lower than generally has been found with accountant subjects. The t-test results for the variables of gender and education and the ANOVA result for the variable of social/political ideology indicate a significant relationship between these variables and the moral development of the respondents.; What may be considered a moderately strong relationship was found between the values and moral development of this sample of CPAs: the median test findings indicate that 10 of the 36 RVS values were ranked significantly different across the P and N2 tercile and quartile groupings. Additional findings include indications of a positive relationship between the priority given to moral type values and moral development, and similarities between the value priorities across the social/political ideology subgroups and the value priorities across the P and N2 tercile subgroups.; Unique aspects of this research include the extensiveness of the variables tested and variables that were tested for the first time. Additionally, this research is one of the largest single studies of the values and/or moral development of CPAs.