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The “Mathews Committee” (Mathews, 1990) concluded that the research performance of the accounting discipline in Australia was weak. This paper is motivated by the need to improve the quality of accounting research in Australia and probably some other countries as well. It discusses three issues of crucial importance to research quality ‐ internal, external, and construct validity with the discussion illustrated with examples from existing accounting research. Internal validity is concerned with the ability to make causal statements from a piece of research. External validity is concerned with the ability to generalize from the research and construct validity is interested in the validity of the variables measured. Internal and external validity are discussed within the context of five common research designs. No one design is strong in both types of validity and tradeoffs between internal and external validity are necessary. When designing a new research project, the particular tradeoffs made should depend on the research objectives. The paper discusses how these choices might be made and how, if internal validity problems exist, they might be minimized. With construct validity, no tradeoffs are appropriate ‐ the researcher should attempt to eliminate this type of invalidity. The paper discusses how this might be done.

The organizational culture–performance link is fundamental to organization development and building a high-performance culture is a responsibility of leaders. The claim of a culture–performance link is most visible in the 1980s (e.g. In Search of Excellence) but is replaced by skepticism by the 1990s. Using conclusion validity as the framework, the purpose of this paper is to synthesize cross-disciplinary literature in organization studies and the emerging sub-field of organizational economics to lay a foundation to establish the link rigorously.

The drivers of conclusion validity – internal validity, external validity and construct validity – guided the literature search and review. The author began with the concepts of organizational culture and performance, examined the organizational economic literature for the causal culture–performance link (internal validity), reviewed the organization studies literature on the debates in the measurement of organizational culture (external and construct validity) and examined the debate if organizational culture can be managed (internal validity).

Organizational economics (which conceptualizes organizational culture as shared beliefs) shows that cultures that are more homogeneous, encourage teamwork and have a clear mission, enhance organizational performance. In measuring culture, survey instruments using the process-oriented approach can rely on these results to strengthen their construct validity. In the search for the organizational culture–performance link, non-cultural factors affecting performance have to be included as control variables.

The weaknesses of early research on the organizational culture–performance link become clear when examined with the conclusion validity framework. This clearness shows the way toward a rigorous empirical analysis.

This review provides guidance for researchers to evaluate published studies on the organizational culture–performance link. It also helps researchers to design new studies with stronger conclusion validity.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the threats to quality in mixed methods accounting research, wherein quantitative and qualitative approaches are combined in data collection, analysis and interpretation.

The paper is framed according to three perspectives. The authors first synthesize the threats to validity and reliability in quantitative and qualitative parts of mixed methods research using the quality standards of each; they then introduce an integrative framework of mixed methods research quality by Teddlie and Tashakkori. Thereafter, they address the specific threats to quality that come to the fore when inferences from the quantitative and qualitative components of the study are combined to form meta‐inferences using a legitimation framework by Onwuegbuzie and Johnson.

The authors' analysis not only indicates a wide range of threats to the validity and reliability of mixed methods research in a range of categories, but also clarifies how the three perspectives described in this paper are linked and supplement each other.

Methodological research published in English over the last decade is emphasized to create an approach to assess mixed methods accounting research. The frameworks analyzed could still be studied in greater detail. Additional perspectives on the validity and reliability of mixed methods research could also be studied and developed.

This paper furthers our understanding of such new developments in methodological research, which may be of great importance to those conducting or evaluating empirical research.

Based on a comprehensive synthesis, this paper presents and analyzes theoretical frameworks potentially useful for scholars, students and practitioners. It focuses on both traditional and novel areas of validity and reliability in mixed methods research.

To investigate the impact of situational factors on mall shoppers' buying decisions.

Based on Belk's framework on situational factors in a sales situation, the study employed a dataset of mall shoppers in the USA, China and Hong Kong and logistic regression for analysis.

It is found that, whether in the combined sample or in the individual samples, nine of the 13 situational factors considered significantly affected shoppers' purchases of food or non‐food products. However, situational influences on purchases varied according to the types of products bought. More importantly, the findings on the impact of some factors were consistent across three or two samples, suggesting that their external validity may be extended to certain conditions.

The study had a limitation in the selection of the malls where the interviews were conducted, so some of the findings may be mall‐specific rather than representative of the general population of shoppers in the nations or regions.

The information disclosed here may help the practitioners to better understand shoppers' (especially Chinese shoppers') behaviour in malls and, as a consequence, to undertake more efficient marketing strategies in malls (especially in the malls in China).

The distinguished feature of this paper is that it simultaneously examined the impacts of 13 situational factors on mall shoppers' purchase decisions with multinational data. This allowed researchers to check both the internal validity and the external validity of the observed impacts of the situational factors.

This paper aims to analyse the impact of clusters on development and growth at the firm and regional level in Latin America (LA). The past 20 years have witnessed an acceleration of cluster initiatives, assuming their positive impact on firm performance and regional development. However, theoretical development and empirical meta-studies in emerging countries to validate this assumed relationship are scarce.

This paper reviews empirical evidence from a population of 123 studies and a sample of 45 empirical studies including 216 clusters in LA.

It concludes that clusters contribute to both development and growth at the firm- and regional-level contingent to factors such as cluster stage of development, collective efficiency, the pattern of governance of the value chain and the sector in which the firm operates; however, clusters are also a potential source of socio-economic divides.

Therefore, these results qualify the conclusions of studies of clusters in developed countries (Porter, 2003; Delgado et al., 2010).

Case study research has been applied across numerous fields and provides an established methodology for exploring and understanding various research contexts. This paper aims to aid in developing methodological rigor by investigating the approaches of establishing validity and reliability.

Based on a systematic review of relevant literature, this paper catalogs the use of validity and reliability measures within academic publications between 2008 and 2018. The review analyzes case study research across 15 peer-reviewed journals (total of 1,372 articles) and highlights the application of validity and reliability measures.

The evidence of the systematic literature review suggests that validity measures appear well established and widely reported within case study–based research articles. However, measures and test procedures related to research reliability appear underrepresented within analyzed articles.

As shown by the presented results, there is a need for more significant reporting of the procedures used related to research reliability. Toward this, the features of a robust case study protocol are defined and discussed.

This study aims to systematically review a total of 513 papers using experimental methods in hospitality and tourism research and then proposed new recommendations to address approaches that have been confusingly adopted or ignored in the current literature.

An extensive literature review was conducted. Together with critiques on previous studies, four recommendations were proposed to help carry out future experimental studies using more rigorous and exact approaches.

Multiple experimental studies can provide stronger evidence for theoretical arguments. Demonstration of the theoretical underlying mechanism using evidence based on mediation and moderating methods is required. The adoption of complementary methods can mitigate the generic weaknesses of experimental methods. In addition, enhancement of the realism of experiments is required to obtain stronger empirical evidence with internal and external validity.

This study proposes four constructive recommendations which help researchers to conduct future experimental design studies correctly. Valid and exact research outcomes can help practitioners to carry out new useful marketing strategies.

After reviewing 513 previous papers that used experimental design in the hospitality and tourism fields, this study proposes four new recommendations to facilitate a better understanding of experimental design. The original and innovative nature of this study will help future investigations to adopt more accurate statistical approaches.

Using the industry as an approximation of the external environment of companies, Dess and Beard proposed the construct organizational task environment (OTE). If the precision of the definition of industry is desirable, it involves a multiplicity of elements that restrict the ability of generalization. This paper aims to contribute by identifying clusters of industries with similar environmental profiles. As the discriminant validity of the OTE construct was tested only by Harris in US manufacturing industry, not supporting it, this study also seeks to contribute by assessing the OTE construct validity for the Brazilian manufacturing industry.

Authors collected data from all manufacturing sectors in Brazil, between 1996 and 2003; they used confirmatory factor analysis with the multi-trait multi-method matrix approach to assess the construct validity and ran environmental dimensions' factorial scores through the cluster analysis to find out natural groupings of industries.

The results support the convergent and discriminant validity of the construct OTE, suggesting that further replication should be conducted in the US economy and in different economic contexts.

The study identified four groups of industries with similar environmental conditions, increasing possibilities of generalization of researches. The limitations stem from measurement in an extended period of time and not measuring changes in the environment.

To expand the analytical capabilities of managers for decision making on the sharing of skills between businesses in different industries.

The main contributions of this work are to further discussions on the validity of the OTE construct and to identify industrial clusters of homogeneous environments.

Despite the advantages of the case study method, its reliability and validity remain in doubt. Tests to establish the validity and reliability of qualitative data are important to determine the stability and quality of the data obtained. However, there is no single, coherent set of validity and reliability tests for each research phase in case study research available in the literature. This article presents an argument for the case study method in marketing research, examining various criteria for judging the quality of the method and highlighting various techniques, which can be addressed to achieve objectivity, and rigorous and relevant information for planning to marketing actions. The purpose of this article is to invite further research by discussing the use of various scientific techniques for establishing the validity and reliability in case study research. The article provides guidelines for achieving high validity and reliability for each phase in case study research.

Notwithstanding the findings of several published articles on human capital, there is scarcity of a comprehensive instrument to measure it. In this direction, the objective of present research is to develop a valid and reliable scale to assess human capital.

This research was divided into two parts. Study 1 focused on literature review of human capital measures, development of items and exploring the factor structure of human capital construct on a sample of 184 employees. Study 2 was based on the survey of 212 employees, and reliability assessment and confirmatory factor analysis was performed to validate the factor structure of human capital construct.

The findings can be summarized in two ways. Study 1 present that human capital scale is multidimensional consisting of employee capability, leadership and motivation, employee satisfaction and creativity. The findings of study 2 confirms the validity and reliability of three factor structure of human capital construct consisting of 18 items in total.

The study provides a multidimensional psychometric instrument which can help in measuring the human capital of the organization from the perspective of capabilities, satisfaction and creativity and leadership and motivation. Moreover, it can serve as an aid to human resource (HR) and human resource development (HRD) professionals for human capital assessment in the organizations.

This study provides a measure to assess human capital in Indian manufacturing sector organizations that makes a novel contribution to the area.