Citizen Use and Comprehension of Government Accounting Information: Applications of Design Science Research Methodology

This dissertation seeks to explore how accounting can alleviate, but also aggravate, the tensions of informed democratic participation. The behavior of accountants and the format of disclosures in governmental accounting have a powerful effect upon how citizens perceive and make decisions about their community. Because accounting research has only recently begun considering citizens as a central actor, there has been limited synthesis of this knowledge between researchers and practitioners.

This dissertation seeks to bridge the gap between governmental accounting practitioners and researchers, and employs the theoretical lens of design science to do so. Design science, originally developed by accounting researchers, is used in other disciplines to bridge similar gaps.

This dissertation provides three contributions to the existing literature. First, this dissertation contributes an epistemological innovation by using a design science perspective to examine this research topic and show how design science remains a valuable tool for accounting research. Second, this dissertation finds evidence supporting Baber & Gore’s (2008) supposition of governmental GAAP compliance in a novel context. Third, this dissertation uses design science methodology to become the first research that shows how practitioners developed and implemented Citizen-Centric Reporting (CCR) and how this has negatively impacted CCR effectiveness.

These contributions begin in Chapter II with a genealogical literature review to show how the earliest uses of design science involved synthesizing the governmental accounting knowledge of both researchers and practitioners.

In Chapter III, a design science paradigm synthesizes practitioner behavior around disclosures with correlational evidence from Washington State that school districts may be forced to choose between GAAP compliance and better performance on citizen-salient metrics, in keeping with Baber and Gore’s (2008) resource-constraint prediction.

Finally, in Chapter IV, the design science DAGS Framework is used to analyze the CCR and its creators’ design goals. The CCR was deployed based on practitioner experience rather than an explicit design model, and there has been limited study of the CCR’s intent or effectiveness. Chapter IV involves interviewing the surviving creators of the CCR to determine the implicit design decisions, and judging whether the CCR fulfills its intended purpose under the constraints of those design decisions.