An explanation of our methodology in plain terms
The Accounting Educator Barometer is an annual, anonymous reading of how it feels to teach accounting. It measures mood, so it’s worth being clear about what that means — what we’re doing, and what we’re not.
What it is
The Barometer asks accounting educators a short set of direct questions about their working life, their view of accounting education, and the link between education and the profession. It reports the mood of the people who answer, much as a consumer-confidence index reports how households feel about the economy rather than measuring the economy itself. The year 2026 sets a baseline, and from 2027 we will see how the mood has changed.
Who it’s for
The Barometer is for anyone who teaches accounting, in any setting and at any level.
By accounting we mean the recording, reporting and analysis of financial and management information: financial and management accounting, financial reporting, audit and assurance, taxation, and the reading and use of financial statements.
That takes in both those who teach it as a named accounting course and those who teach it within broader subjects such as business, enterprise or entrepreneurship — the latter often not thinking of themselves as accounting educators at all. It does not extend to teaching that merely sits adjacent to accounting, such as economics or general finance.
We intentionally recruit by activity rather than job title. The label “accounting educator” is not universally adopted across schools, colleges, universities, professional training and the workplace, and a good number of the people we most want to hear from may not use that term to describe themselves.
How we gather responses
The survey is open and anonymous. Anyone who fits the description above can take part. We draw responses from the Accounting Cafe community of some two thousand members and from the wider networks we can reach. We collect no name, email or employer, and we don’t record the digital address a response comes from.
This is a self-selected sample, and the answers are self-reported. People who choose to respond to a survey about how it feels to teach are not a random sample of all who teach.
What we claim, and what we don’t
The Barometer is not a representative survey of the whole population of accounting educators, and we cannot provide margins of error for its findings. We report what this group of educators told us, with the number of responses shown, and we break the findings down by setting, region and career stage only where we hold enough responses to do so responsibly — our working threshold is around 500 completed responses before we segment the data.
Consistency over time makes the exercise worthwhile. Because the survey and the method stay the same from year to year, the biases that come with a self-selected sample are broadly stable, so the movement in the mood from one year to the next carries more meaning than any single year.
We have made some design choices to keep the measurement clear. We use single, direct questions rather than composite scores. We use fully labelled, item-specific answer scales rather than agree/disagree grids, which are known to invite acquiescent answering (Krosnick & Presser, 2010)Krosnick, J. A. & Presser, S. (2010) Question and Questionnaire Design, in Marsden, P. V. & Wright, J. D. (eds.) Handbook of Survey Research, 2nd ed. Emerald.. We frame questions in the first person, so people report their own experience rather than estimate the aggregate. And we keep the survey anonymous, to take the pressure of social desirability off the answers. The questions are grounded in established frameworks for work motivation and wellbeing — Self-Determination Theory, and the Job Demands–Resources model.
What it is not
The Barometer isn’t an employer’s staff-engagement survey, nor a wellbeing screen for individuals, and it doesn’t rank institutions. It doesn’t try to explain why the mood is what it is. It is simply a measure of the mood — and we publish the questions, the response counts and the limits alongside it, so you can weigh its results for yourself.
Last updated: June 2026.
