The purpose of this study is to investigate problem representation and judgment by auditing professionals within the context of a going‐concern task. Our results suggest more experienced auditors have more concise problem representations than do novices. In addition, our results show that some types of concepts listed in the problem representation are associated with judgment, regardless of experience level.
This study makes several contributions. First, understanding differences in problem representation at different levels of experience (novice, intermediate, and experienced) gives insight into the process of how representations change as experience changes/develops. Understanding the development of “becoming qualified” to make judgments regarding the going‐concern evaluation assists in (1) the development of teaching approaches for analyzing a company's financial condition, and (2) professional development for less‐experienced professionals. Further, our measure of problem representation, similar to that in Christ's (1993) study, provides a task‐sensitive measure of problem representation for accounting research. This should have important implications for understanding expertise development in complex problem‐solving tasks that auditors and accountants face.
