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ANOVA Uses and Contingency Table

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1. Name an application for the use of ANOVA. This can be in a professional setting, hobby, or something you find on the internet

2. What are some business situations where ANOVA would be more appropriate than a Z or T test?

3. Find an example of the use of a contingency table from the internet. Describe what it was testing for and what the result was.

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Solution Summary

This solution in-depth solution of more than 8,000 words offers references and explanations on the applications for the use of an ANOVA. It also discusses the appropriateness in using either ANOVA or z-test and t-test and discusses the use of a contingency table.

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1. Name an application for the use of ANOVA. This can be in a professional setting, hobby, or something you find on the internet

Solution:
http://www.sfam.org.uk/pdf/features/anova.pdf

2. What are some business situations where ANOVA would be more appropriate than a Z or T test?
Solution:

http://ejbo.jyu.fi/index.cgi?page=articles/0201_1
Abstract
The basic question addressed in this study is whether accounting students, from four countries located in three different continents, are aware of ethical conduct and if there are any differences in awareness among these groups of students. The subjects are from Mississippi State University (United States), the University of the Philippines (Philippines), the University of Indonesia at Jakarta (Indonesia), and University of Tampere (Finland). Specifically, the study examined the studentïs perception of ethical relative to sixteen cases, each of which describes an ethical dilemma. The results showed that, overall, the students from the four universities differ significantly in their perceptions of ethics. The students from the University of the Philippines indicated the highest degree of ethical awareness. The students from Mississippi State University and the University of Tampere showed almost identical scores. In seven of the sixteen cases, all four groups of students clearly showed ethical awareness. All four groups of students were indifferent of situtations that include training sales force on high-pressured selling techniques and hiring employees away from competitors. All four groups of students found nothing wrong with giving awards to customers based on dollar purchases to maintain customers loyalty. All four groups expressed their strongest disapproval of deceitful actions involving unsubstantiated adverstising claim, using high pollutant material to avoid raising price, and selling a banned carcinogen sleepwar in far flung areas with no means of knowing about the danger if the product.

The recent emphasis on the inclusion of ethics in business curricula has given rise to the questions of how aware the business student is already of the subject. If the student has already learned of the difference between right and wrong, then the curricula would be different to that which would be required by student who does not know of this difference. The purpose of such a course would be to give the student some understanding of what would be considered ethical conduct before the student moves into the "real" world, whrere each segment of society is trying to define and apply ethical principles as perceived and required within that segment. Thus, in the business segment, a specific set of rules and accetable patterns of behavior have been developed; bankers, lawyers, accountants, doctors and other professionals have specific codes of ethics to which adherence is expected. The purpose of this study is to examine whether accounting students, from four countries located in three continents, viz., Mississippi State University (MSU), University fo the Philippines (UP) in Manila, University of Indonesia (UI) at Jakarta, and University of Tampere (UT) in Finland area aware of ethical conduct and if there are any differences in awareness among these four groups of accounting students.

Backgrounds
The United States in the last two decades, the 70ïs and the 80ïs, have been racked by scandals at various government units. The Watergate, Iran Contra, and the HUD scandals indicated the lack of ethics at the Executive levels. At the Congressional level, the House Post Office and House Bank scandals illustrated the lack of ethical principles among those elected by the people. In business, on Wall Street, the insider trading scandals, highlighted by Ivan Boesky and Michael Miliken, showed the lack of ethics at the highest financial levels. The legal settlements, which allowed these two principals to retain much of their ill-gotten gains, did not create fear of punishment in the general populace. The Savings and Loan (S & L) industry failures, notably that of Silverado Bank, and Lincoln Savings, have been other examples of ethical failures. Recipients of the blame for these debacles are, in general, governmental deregulation and, in particular, the auditors of the defunct S & Ls. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the former Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp. (FSLIC) have sued who were then the eight accounting firms, alleging that faulty audits hid the truth about insolvent S & Ls. Three of the defendants are members of the ïBig Sixï (The Washington Post, October 24, 1990, p.12). The resulting public outcry has forced the government to file lawsuits against all but one of the ïBig Sixï. Accountants are now facing claims of more than $2 billion in damages, and regulators are preparing lawsuits demanding millions more. Critics for the profession allege that due to a shrinking pool of clients in the 1980s the Big Six firms sometimes turned a blind eye to questionable activityto hold on to business (Business Week, April 6, 1992, pp. 78-79). It is not only in the United States that such scandals have occured. In Japan, the Recruit scandal connected highly placed politicians with big time gangsters. German corporations made porfits by setting up poison gas factories in Libya and Iraq. Dow Corning, a corporation that has an ethics program since 1976, had to withdraw its breast implants under pressure from the public and the Food and Drug Administration, on the grounds that insufficient testing could not answer the question of the effect of the silicone if the implant ruptured (Business Week, March 9, 1992, pp. 67-69). The largest financial scandal of the eighties decade was the failure of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) and to this day investigators are unable to explain the disappearance of $15 billion (The Economist, Nov. 30, 1991, p. 76). The recent indictment of one of Washingtonïs most respected persons, Clifford Clark, allegedly for taking brides (Time, August 10, 1992, p. 40) indicates that ethical values have sunk extremely low.

One of the developing problems that ethicists face is due to the increasing internationalization of business. For example, a team of American managers may be stationed in a Third World country. Ethical values may not be emphasized in that country to the extent they are in the United States. Thus, having to accept lower ethical standards in business dealings, such as bribery, and comissions to power brokers, and then having to account for these "black" or "under the table" amounts, in some manner, in the books, could create a "laissez faire" attitude in these managers. When the tour of duty is over, would the returning managers be able to adjust back to the higher standards of ethics that would be expected in the United States? (Fortune, April 20, 1992, p. 168). In the United Kingdom, the accounting profession has also been haunted, in the recent past, by two financial scandals, the Dunsdale saga and the Guinness case. In the first case, the auditors were being blamed, while in the latter, the auditors picked up the trail but were never given the chance to pursue it to its logical conclusion (The Boston Line, October, 1990, p. 6). Thus, it is seen that such scandals are not part of any spesific geographic locale, but indicate a lack of global ethical principles. The general reaction in the United States seems to be try to educate the younger generation and efforts have been made by business schools to integrate ethics instruction into the curriculum as required by the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB).

Literature Review
There were several studies conducted on ethical values of business students. A number of studies compared the perceptions of ethical values between liberal arts students with those of business students. The results did not indicate that one group was more ethical than the other.

Goodman and Crawford (1974) found that there were no significant differences in ethical values between liberal arts majors and business students. Hawkins and Cocanougher (1972) and Shuptrine (1979) found that business students tend to accept questionable business practices more readily than no-business majors. Hawkins and Cocanougher also found that senior business students are more tolerant of questionable business practices than junior business students.

Harris in a 1989 study found (1) a significant difference in ethical values of graduating business and non-business majors; (2) that pre-business freshmen and non-business freshmen differ in ethical measures; (3) no significant difference among non-business freshman and seniors; and (4) that senior business students are more tolerant of questionable business practices than incoming freshmen.

Arlow and Ulrich (1985) carried out a longitudinal study, involving three time periods, to evaluate the effectiveness of ethics intstruction on students. They found that, in the long run, ethical instruction has no significant impact on ethical values. This is agreement with a study done by Andrews in 1979 which indicated that ethics instruction did not change the ethical values of graduate business students.

There are a few studies which compared accounting majors with other business majors. Arlow and Ulrich (1980) tested business students at the beginning and end of the semester in a business and society course to see if the course material had any impact on the students ethical values. The results of the study showed a decrease in ethical values among accounting students while those management and marketing students increased. Cherrington and Cherrington (1979) found that in cases involving moral dilemmas, accounting students fared better in honesty than the overall average and that accounting students were only slighty more honest than management students but considerably more honest than advertising students.

The results of a study by Fulmer and Cargile (1983) indicated that there are differences between accounting students and some other business students in the way ethical issues are perceived, with accounting students tending toward a more ethical viewpoint. The differences, however, appear to be found in perceptinons only, not in actions.

A number of studies have examined the professional and work characteristics of accountants across cultures. In a study of Australian and U.S. auditors, Ferris, Dillard and Nethercott (1980) found few differences with respect to personal value structures, perceptions of the work environment, and work motivation levels. The authors suggest that cross national differences should be insignificant between countries of approximately the same level of economic development and with language similarities. In contrast, Amernic, Kanungo, and Aranya (1983), in a study of Anglophile and Francophile charactered accountants in Quebec, Canada, found that culture has a significant effect on certain professional and work values.

In an international comparison study, Ishmael P. Akaah (1990) examined differences in attitudes towards research ethics among marketing professionals in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and the United States. The results of the study indicated a lack of significant differences in such attitudes among the marketing professionals in the four countries involved. The author explained the results by citing the fact that the four countries have a lot in common. The four are highly developed economically, all four believed in the free enterprise system, and all four have a common ancestry.

Swinyard, Rinne and Kau (1990) did a cross-cultural study that examined differences in morality and behvior toward software piracy in Singapore versus the United States. The study involved a total of 371 students - 221 attending a major western U.S. university and 150 attending the National University of Singapore. The study found that, although the Singaporean subjects were more knowledgeable about software copyright law, their attitudes were less supportive of those laws. The result of the study also indicated that in making a moral decision, the Singaporean group was more influenced by the benefits of their actions on self, family, or community than by the legality of copying the software. On the other hand, the Americans based their moral decisions on the legality of the decision.

Although the study by Swinyard, Rinne and Kau was a cross-cultural study, the issue involved specifially that of copyright laws. Protection legislation covering copyright, patent and trade secrets originated in the Western world. The Asian culture, however, does not generally support the notion of protecting proprietary creative work. Thus, the results of the study are expected and are not a reflection of the general perception of ethical values by the student samples representing Asian and American cultures.

Russell Abratt, Deon Nel and Nicola Susan Higgs carried out an empirical study of the ethical beliefs of a group of South African and Australian managers. A questionnaire using 28 scenarios or vignettes was circulated to the two groups of managers and then analyzed for differences using T-tests and MANOVA. Results indicated that only three of the scenarios rejected the hypothesis of no difference between the two groups ...

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