3. The Experimental Instrument

In this chapter provides a description of the experimental instrument (or questionnaire) used in the study in Chap. 2 with auditors as respondents. This chapter describes briefly the different parts in the experimental instrument as they appear in the questionnaire provided to the auditors to enable the reader to reconstruct the questionnaire if he or she wish to do so. The design in the experimental instrument manipulates the risk of material misstatement at two levels (low and high) and to manipulate affect at two levels (positive and negative). The manipulations are randomly assigned to the auditors. The experimental instrument consists of the experimental audit case that describes an ABC company, a hypothetical audit client that sells designer maternity clothing to small specialty clothing shops. The questionnaire asks the participating auditors to audit the ABC company inventory account according to the international accounting standards (IAS). The audit case in the questionnaire is based on an inventory valuation issue in ABC.