Survey seeks to identify what companies should include in sustainability reports
What do you want to know about a company’s sustainability activities? That’s what a survey currently under way by a team of researchers in the NC State University Poole College of Management seeks to answer.
“The purpose of this study is to find out what consumers want to know about a company’s sustainability activities,” said Dr. Julie Earp, associate professor in Poole College’s Department of Business Management.
To learn that, Earp and her research colleagues in the college’s Department of Accounting have made the survey open to anyone in the U.S., age 18 and over, who wants to participate. Follow this link to the survey..
“While companies are increasingly investing time and effort into producing corporate reports that describe their sustainability activities, no research has determined what kind of information stakeholders want to see in these reports,” Earp said.
“We aim to reveal what sustainability activities are most important to individuals and what sustainability dimensions should be considered by corporations,” she said. This study has been funded by the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA).
Earp, Dr. Marianne Bradford, associate professor of accounting, and Dr. Paul Williams, professor of accounting, began the research project by analyzing the content of numerous corporate reports, extracting all the sustainability activities from each company’s year-end report. The survey includes a list of the extracted activities and asks participants to rate the importance of those.
Results of the survey will allow the researchers to develop a framework and reliable scale to measure individual concerns about corporate sustainability. That, in turn, can help guide companies as they develop their reports, Earp said.
“Recognizing the significance of certain sustainable activities will allow companies to more effectively utilize their enterprise resource planning systems for sustainability reporting,” she said. “This has not been addressed in the literature and is an area of sustainability that our research addresses.”
Survey participant who provide an email address will be entered into a drawing for a VISA gift card. They also can register to receive results of the survey. The researchers will be submitting a report of their results and analysis to a research journal for publication.
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