A quantitative study of accounting methods in mid-nineteenth-century Alabama and Mississippi: an application of content analysis

Abstract

Archival searches and the case study have traditionally been the primary research tools used by accounting historians to further their knowledge of the development of accounting practices. The case-study method, though, has a limited scope because it often emphasizes the practices of a single participant in the business community. This fosters an implicit fallacy which assumes that the practices of this player are those of the community in general. Such a fallacy tends to overshadow a much needed question: how much of the business community accepted certain accounting practices? The study presented in this paper addresses this question and applies the statistical techniques of content analysis and proportions tests to determine whether retail stores in the states of Alabama and Mississippi during the mid-nineteenth century used accounting techniques that they developed themselves or used ones that were presented in bookkeeping texts published in the northern states. The results show that, while some of th...