6. Research design and data collection
A postal questionnaire survey was used to gather the data. A random sample consisting of 1000 UK
manufacturing/service firm of was chosen from the Financial Analysis Made Easy (FAME) database.
Only firms with annual sales exceeding £50 million were selected since the focus was on larger companies
that would be likely to have an established management accounting function. The membership
database of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) was used to assist in identifying
potential respondents within the selected FAME sample. An attempt was made to match the 1000 firms
with the CIMA database. This resulted in the identification of 534 firms where named individuals were
identified operating within the management accounting function but the remaining 466 questionnaires
were addressed to the Finance Director with the instruction that the questionnaire should be completed
by the head of the management accounting function.
A total of 384 questionnaires were returned from the sample of 1,000 companies consisting of 176
completed and usable questionnaires and 208 uncompleted. This yielded a usable response rate of 19.6%
based on the method recommended by De Vaus (1990).7 Details relating to the respondents’ business
sector and annual sales turnover are presented in Table 2.8
Respondents were asked to complete the questionnaire from the perspective of the business unit where
they were employed. The justification for this is that the features of costing systems and contextual factors
may differ between business units in large companies. For example, one business unit may have low product
diversity and low overhead costs thus resulting in a simplistic costing being appropriate. In contrast,
another business unit within the same company may engage in different activities and have high product
diversity and overhead costs resulting in a more sophisticated costing system being appropriate.