Questionnaire Design and Content

Ethics approval of the fieldwork was sought and was granted by the Ethics Committee at Victoria University and the questionnaire was also approved by the Ethics Committee before it was distributed among respondents in Libya. The questionnaire for this study was accompanied by a covering letter followed by a letter from the researcher encouraging the participants to complete it and assuring them of total confidentiality. The full questionnaire, in the form that it was distributed to the respondents, is attached in an Appendix which can be found at the end of this thesis. All the questionnaires were framed and developed by the researcher and not modified or derived from previous studies particularly, as there were no existing studies in the literature using the questionnaire format to investigate perceptions of audit delay. The questionnaire was divided into three main sections and each section included several questions or statements as described below.

Section one: In order to obtain a profile of the respondents participating in this research, the participants were asked in this section to provide information about their background by answering some personal questions using nominal scales. This information included the following:

• Position: respondents were asked to indicate their position as: partner/owner, senior auditor, employee, or other.

• Gender: respondents were asked to indicate whether they were male or female

• Age: respondents were asked to indicate the age group to which they belong.

• Level of education: respondents were asked to indicate their highest education level achieved: first university degree, master degree, PhD and others.

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• Country of study: respondents were asked to indicate where they achieved the highest level of their education: Libya, UK, USA, Australia and others.

• Occupation: respondents were asked to identify their occupation classified as: external auditors or auditors from the Institute of Financial Auditing.

• Working experience: respondents were asked to indicate the length of their working experience under four categories ranging from under 5 years to 15 years and over.

• Average number of companies audited: respondents were asked to indicate how many companies they audit every financial year, ranging from 1-5 companies to more than 10 companies.

This personal information could be used when analysing the data to examine whether these personal characteristics had any effects on the participants’ answers to the statements included in the questionnaire.

Section two: The second part of the questionnaire was designed to examine the perceptions of participants on the impact of company-specific factors on audit delay in Libya. Respondents were asked in this part to indicate their agreement or disagreement with a number of statements related to the company attributes of size, profitability, industry type, yearend, internal control system and extraordinary items.

Section three: This section was about the respondents’ perceptions as to the effect of some audit-related factors on audit delay. These factors are audit firm size and type of audit opinion. In the first part of this section, the respondents were given six statements related to audit firm size and its effect on audit delay and in the second part the participants were given four statements that dealt with the effect of audit opinion on audit delay.

Another important factor in writing questions is the distinction between question type and the format of the intended response. Sekaran (2003) argues that the type of question refers to the way in which the questions are presented in the questionnaire, and these are of two types, factual and attitudinal. Factual questions ask for information about characteristics, events and experiences, while attitudinal questions ask about attitude, beliefs and feelings. The first part of the questionnaire in this study focused on eliciting demographic data about the respondents and can be considered as involving factual questions. On the other hand, the other sections

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where the respondents were asked to indicate how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the research statements can be considered as attitudinal in nature.

With regard to the format of responses there are two types, the open and closed response. In closed response questions, respondents are offered a choice of alternative replies and asked to tick or underline their chosen answer, whereas open-ended questions allow the respondents to state the answer in their own words. All questions using a nominal or ratio scale are considered closed. The most common approach for such questions is the Likert rating scale in which the researcher asks the respondents to rate their answer (Sekaran, 2003). Open-ended questions can be useful in questionnaires if the researcher is unsure of the response. It is also useful in exploratory research when the researcher requires a detailed answer or when the researcher seeks to find out what is uppermost in the respondent's mind (Remenyi et al., 1998).

Each type of question (open-ended and closed) comes with its own advantages and disadvantages (Sekaran, 2003). The main advantage of open-ended questions is that they gives freedom to respondents in answering questions and allows them to express their ideas spontaneously in their own words (Oppenheim, 2000). In addition, they allow the researcher to obtain new information where there is very little existing information available about the research topic (Teresa & Auriat, 2005). However, from an analytical point of view, open- ended questions may be difficult to answer and even more difficult to analyse (Kothari, 2008). Easterby-Smith et al. (2002) argue that while much valuable information could be obtained by using open-ended questions, there may also be much useless and irrelevant data which could be difficult and time-consuming to analyse.

The advantages of closed-ended questions are that they are easy and quick to answer. This often means that more questions can be asked within a given length of time (Oppenheim, 2000). Closed-ended questions are very convenient for collecting factual data. The main disadvantage of closed-ended questions is a loss of spontaneity and expressiveness because they do not allow respondents to create or express their ideas (Teresa & Auriat, 2005). Further, Oppenheim (2000) contends that closed-ended questions may introduce bias by forcing respondents to choose between given alternatives or by making them focus on alternatives that might not have occurred to them. Given this weakness, Moore (2006) advises that the researcher should include choices representing all the likely answers to a

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question and ensure that the choices are completely exclusive so that there is no ambiguity or overlap between them.

In this study, closed-ended questions were used as they are quick and easy to answer and more suited to quantitative research. In the first section, the demographic profile, respondents were asked to tick a particular classification or characteristic such as gender, age, level of education etc. In the other sections relating to perceptions about audit delay, the questionnaire used statements with a 5-point Likert scale where 1 referred to “strongly disagree” and 5 to “strongly agree”. According to Collis and Hussey (2003), the Likert scale is one of the most frequently used types of scales. It turns the question into a statement and asks the participants to indicate their level of agreement with the statement. In addition, a space for additional views and comments was provided at the end of the questionnaire.

In document An empirical examination of the determinants of audit report delay in Libya (Page 123-126)