Social and Environmental Reporting: How informative is the disclosure of Community Involvement Cost – Qualitative or Quantitative

Evidences exist that investors see social and environmental information as very important in making investment decisions and hence demand adequate disclosure of such information. This research seeks to explore the information content of ‘rarely’ researched environmental information - community involvement. Similar decision-usefulness studies of this nature have investigated human resource and pollution costs but none has investigated community involvement. The community has been identified as an important member of the stakeholder system, it is therefore expected that information on community involvement in annual report should have a significant relevance to investment decision. This research therefore seeks to test the stakeholder theory as it relates to the community and also explore the linguistic relativity of accounting information as theorized by Jain (1973) and Belkaoui (1978). Furthermore following the suggestion of Dierkes and Antal (1985) that the usefulness of social information can better be measured by investigating its impact on decision making, this research will focus on the decision-usefulness of community involvement cost and will investigate the mechanism for presenting this information in the most useful way to stakeholders. To this end the research will explore specifically the effect of disclosure format of community involvement cost on investment decision. Following a deductive approach, the research will be conducted using quantitative methodology, while the research strategy will be experimental. The experiments will be based on an objective and systematic attitude survey of investors and other users of financial report. The instrument to be used for the survey will be modelled after Hendricks (1976) and Belkaoui 1980.