Accounting Field Studies and Supervisory Strategies

Abstract

This paper discusses the supervisory strategy's adherence to the challenges of field studies' design and conduction. This adherence may increase the quality of this type of research, being useful for theory development or testing in management and financial accounting. For accomplishing this, the recognized supervisory strategies are identified in Higher Education literature and analyzed according the field studies particularities. Following the analyses focuses on the supervisor role in a range of tactics applied in field studies, highlighting their contribution in mitigate the threats to reliability and validity conditions. Field study supervisory, mainly due to nature of the students tasks (less prone to anticipate a standard design ex ante), demands more intensive supervisor's participation, as developing the student's skills at research and protocol design phases as supporting them after start the field data collection in ex post choices, like helping to resolve the gaps and inconsistencies identified in triangulated information through interview, firm's archival data, survey and personal observation.