Accounting Students and Communication Apprehension: A Study of Spanish and UK Students

ABSTRACT

Accounting is about measuring and communicating. Accounting bodies and employers have expressed opinions, which have been supported by research results, advocating that greater emphasis is placed on the development of communication skills throughout the education and training of accountants. Consequently, an increasing number of accounting programmes now include communication skills as educational objectives or learning outcomes, and have integrated activities into the curriculum specifically to develop these skills. It is important to recognise that certain factors can severely restrict the development of communication skills; a major factor is communication apprehension. Research suggests that the existence of high levels of communication apprehension will make efforts to improve communication skills ineffective. Previous research findings indicate that accounting students have high levels of communication apprehension. This paper compares and contrasts the levels and profiles of communication apprehension exhibited by accounting students at the (UK University) and those at the (ESP University). The levels of communication apprehension are also compared with those of students from other disciplines at the same institutions. The results confirm the high levels of communication apprehension in European accounting students. There are notable differences between the two countries however in certain underlying factors.

Notes

¹Both instruments and correction keys are available from Professor McCroskey's web page (www.jamesmccroskey.com). The Spanish and English versions of the questionnaire are available on request from the authors.

²Examples of the questions are as follows: ‘I have no fear of my writing being evaluated’, ‘Participating in a group discussion with new people makes me tense and nervous’, ‘While giving a presentation, I get so nervous I forget facts I really know’.

³For example: ‘For the purpose of this questionnaire “presentation” means a formal verbal communication given to an audience (e.g. speech).’

⁴As the composition of each sub-sample, on the main personal characteristics, is different (see Table 1), in order to avoid the undesired effect of such composition in statistical tests, each case was assigned a weight that allowed to proxy for a perfect stratified sample.