The Relationship among Ethical Ideologies, Ethical Sensitivity and Attitude of Business Students towards Accounting

This paper examines the relationships between ethical ideology, ethical sensitivity and attitude of undergraduate business students towards accounting course. The data was gathered by using questionnaire designed to measure these variables from undergraduate business students of one public university in Turkey. Confirmatory factor analyses and Structural Equation Modeling were applied in order to analyze data. Results indicates that: (1) Attitude of business students towards accounting course are positively affected by their ethical sensitivity. (2) However different ethical ideologies have different impacts on attitude; SEM analysis show that while idealism has negative impact on the attitude towards accounting, relativism has positive impact contrary to the expectations. This contraversial results directed the study to investigate mediation effect of ethical sensitivity between idealism and attitude. Mediation analysis showed that ethical sensitivity has full mediation effect on the relationship idealism and ethical sensitivity. (3) The effects of idealism and relativism on ethical sensitivity of students were also investigated. According to results it is infered that while idealism has positive impact, relativism has negative impact on ethical sensitivity.