VITA in a marketing research course: It’s not just for accounting students anymore

Abstract

The IRS Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program provides free income tax preparation and filing services for low- and moderate-income households. Accounting students from universities across the U.S. have provided these services for many years. A partnership has been in place for five years between VITA and the marketing research course at a university in which marketing students provide volunteer services supporting the research objectives of the local VITA program, which align with the course objectives. This paper provides the supporting theory, affirmative results, and pedagogical details to implement this experiential service-learning project, including adaptations during a pandemic and for similar course projects.

Keywords:

• Data analysis
• experiential learning
• marketing research
• pandemic
• service learning
• VITA

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the United Way of Greater Stark County for their ongoing successful partnership with this course project.

Walsh University IRB APPROVAL NUMBER: 2016014

Research was approved as “exempt” under IRB approval process.

Disclosure statement

No financial interest or benefit has arisen from direct application of this research.

Data availability statement

The DOI for the data set and supporting results are available through the following: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13655501.v1.