A comparative study on the business school students' perceptions on the professional accountancy of Turkey

Accounting profession has had a bad reputation in many countries for years. This might come from misinformation or misperception. This has been well studied around the world recently. The studies realized in the last decade mainly have been on the understanding and analyzing the opinions and/or perceptions of the public or the different communities on the professional accountants in different countries. Inspired from these studies, the purpose of the study is to examine any changes occurred on the negative perceptions of the business school students of Istanbul University on the Turkish accounting profession in five years from 2007 to 2012. In that regard, this study has sought whether any changes occurred in Turkey in five years; (1) on the factors affecting the students’ perceptions, (2) on their perceptions about the differences of the duties conducted by two different levels of the accounting profession, and (3) on their perceptions about the accounting profession by demographical features (gender, section, and level). A structured questionnaire was adopted from the study of Jackling (2002) and conducted first in 2007, and the study simply concluded that the accounting profession has a bad reputation for business school students in Turkey (Pekdemir and Pekdemir, 2011). This was not unique or new since it was the same in many countries. The study was repeated in 2012 in the same school of business in order to identify possible differences on the perceptions of the business school students. Four different sections of questions were asked to the students in both studies. The data gathered were analyzed through the SPSS Software Package. Findings of the comparison are interesting themselves, and also might be intriguing for particular people to make more comparative studies.