Examining nonprofit accounting using behavioral research methods

In this chapter we define behavioral research methods and offer a high-level overview of the advantages of their use for the study of nonprofit accounting. We suggest that behavioral research is underutilized in this field, despite the opportunities these methods offer scholars. Behavioral research has relative advantages over archival research methods when data do not exist or are not available in a timely manner, when scholars want to examine a unit of analysis other than the organization, or when researchers want detailed information about how accounting is used in decision-making. We identify contributions to the field that use experiments, surveys, and qualitative methods and offer suggestions for future research. Overall, we argue that behavioral methods offer substantial opportunities for contributions to scholarship in the field of nonprofit accounting.