AJAR (Asian Journal of Accounting Research) (e-Journal)
Volume 1 Issue 2

Practical Challenge of Content Analysis: An Illustrative Example from Recoding IC Information in the UK's Companies Annual Reports

Mara Ridhuan Che Abdul Rahman (Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia)



Article Info

Publish Date
31 Aug 2016

Abstract

Intellectual capital (IC) is believed to be more important resources to add the value of a company rather than physical assets. This gives rise to the increasing practice of reporting IC information in corporate annual report. Over the past fifteen years, considerable numbers of studies have employed content analysis to examine the extent and nature of IC information in several countries, but they presented different results. These results might partly contribute to different methods in counting information. In fact, the previous studies have been critised for not explicitly clarifying how information was recoded and counted which led to incomparable findings. Therefore, this paper firstly seeks to discuss an illustrative example of ‘sense-making‘ process in identifying, categorizing, and counting of IC information in annual reports of pilot sample company. Secondly, the method refined in the pilot study was applied over the final samples of six large companies in the UK from 1974 to 2008 The contribution of this paper is to primarily refine the previous method in recoding information, to send a message that transparency is crucial in content analysis and to facilitate method replication for future studies. Overall, this study demonstrates a marked increase in IC information disclosure was identified over the 35 years. The relational capital information disclosure was relatively more prominent over time, followed by human capital and structural capital.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

AJAR

Publisher

Subject

Description

The Asian Journal of Accounting Research (AJAR) provides a forum for international researchers to publish original articles of high-quality research findings which contribute to academic literature and practice. AJAR welcomes a wide range of methodologies in all aspects of accounting and finance in ...