The second factor measures the perceptions of the work that accountants do and is
labelled “accountants’ work”. The items that loaded on this factor include: “accountants
are number-crunchers: they seldom work with people” with a factor loading of 0.781,
“accountants work alone more than they work with people” with a factor loading of
0.762, and “accounting is a lot of fixed rules: it doesn’t involve conceptual skills or
judgement” with a factor loading of 0.744. The “accountants’ work” factor explains
19.6 per cent of the variance between items surveyed.