An Empirical Study of the Professional Socialization of Accounting Students

The purpose of this paper is to investigate accounting student attitudes at one stage of the process of educating and orienting individuals to enter the profession of public accounting, i.e., the “professional socialization’ ” of accounting students. A survey research instrument designed to assess student perceptions along a variety of job-related dimensions was developed. The results reported here provide an overall view of how one group of accounting students viewed the public accounting profession at a specific point in their careers. Also changes in perceptions for a group of accounting internship students are described.