A pandemic era study of accounting doctoral students

In this study, we explore how accounting doctoral students fared during the pandemic. We survey accounting doctoral students from Canada and the United States and perform quantitative and qualitative analyses of the responses. We situate our research within social cognitive theory, and our findings suggest that accounting doctoral students experienced some stress and burnout due to exhaustion. Most students coped using healthy strategies; however, we highlight correlations between stress and burnout for those who didn’t. We also propose a series of possible interventions that can be adopted to support retention and future recruitment efforts. Some of these interventions reflect long-standing challenges faced by accounting doctoral students, such as increasing financial aid and having better-supported faculty to supervise students; however, many new challenges emerged because of shifts in doctoral studies during the pandemic and will require more innovative solutions.