Reflective Journal on Gender Diversity in Accounting and Audit Quality

Reflective Journal 1
Research reflective Journal
Student Number
Class & Course Code
Trimester Number
Professor
University
The City & State
Date

Reflective Journal 2
Introduction
A reflective essay is used to describe a learning experience or event. A reflective essay allows a
learner to describe a past learning experience in a contemporary perspective for a reader to
understand as well. My group partner and I studied the topic of Gender diversity in accounting
and audit quality. The research was based on the idea that gender diversity had a positive
influence to improve audit quality and constraint any aggressive accounting (Fook, 2015, p. 76). I
am using this reflective essay to present my personal experience of the entire process. Before the
research study, I was only equipped with the knowledge that I had gathered during class work.
Currently, I am in a better position to give an account of what a researching process entails. I
believe that the skills and experience that I have gathered will help me to become an excellent
researcher in the future. This reflection essay addresses areas such as topic approval, literature
review process, project method, findings, and challenges and limitations.
Topic Approval
The topic guides a writer on what to write in a paper as well as providing a scholarly
communication to the relevant parties. The relevancy of a research topic determines the
usefulness of a research. Our course instructor maintained that a study would have no value if the
topic is irrelevant. To ensure that the aspect of relevancy had been addressed, we forwarded our
topic to our course instructor for approval. The research topic, Gender diversity on accounting
and audit quality, was approved two weeks later. In other words, our study topic had been
approved relevant to the accounting and auditing professionals and the education field. We
developed the research problem, research objective, and research questions after the approval of
the topic (McIntosh, 2010, p. 123).

Reflective Journal 3
Literature Review process
Literature review refers to researching the findings of the previous studies on a particular topic.
Reviewing the literature provided us with insightful information about the study topic. The
findings from the reviewed literature assisted us in defining our scope of the study as well as
identify a research gap (Lyons, 2010, p. 93).
We began the process of literature review by choosing and seeking approval of the research topic.
The research topic helped us to form a centralised research question. To obtain specific
information on the topic of study, we were guided by the following factors. First, the research
question was manageable. Second, we identified all the possible terms that would be used to
describe the study topic and the study variables. Third, we shared our progress with the professor
to seek a clear understanding of the topic (Onwuegbuzie & Frels, 2016, p. 115).
The second step was to define the scope of the literature review. Here we defined the number of
studies to focus on based on their in-depth analysis of the topic. As per the requirements of the
study, we included at least ten previous studies on the topic (Jasper, 2017, p. 91). The search for
relevant articles included but not limited to;
a) Gender diversity and modelling quality management of earnings in auditing;
b) How the market reacts to the gender of audit committees;
c) Whether the existence of female in audit committees influence audit fees;
d) Whether existence of female auditors constraints the management of earnings;
e) Correlation between gender composition in audit firms and audit quality.
f) And, the difference in audit fee and audit quality between male and female auditors.
The last step was to select reliable sources of information where we would obtain relevant past
information on the topic. Our sources of information included databases such as Social Science
Research Network (SSRN), Harvard Business Review, the depository of PCAOB Auditor search