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e finalized draft financial statements subject to audit.Onemight
expect shareholders to read the company’s preliminary announcements in
more depth due to the timeliness of the publication. However, as shown in
Table 3,more than 40%of our respondents do not read these announcements
at all. One reason for this finding could be that shareholders are unfamiliar
with the nature and role of preliminary announcements; Hussey & Woolfe
(1994, p. 103) report that a majority of their interviewees were unable to
give any opinion on the usefulness of preliminary announcements. Other
reasons for their lack of readership might include the fact that they are not
audited and, therefore, cannot necessarily be relied upon; they could be
seen simply as management propaganda.
56·4% of our respondents read reports from their stockbroker thoroughly
or briefly in order to gain company information, but only 15% of these see
such reports as the most influential source of information. Television media,
such as Teletext, and computer software, for example Datastream, are
referred to the least. Possible explanations for this finding are the availability
of such sources and lack of familiarity with the necessary technology
(although we did not ask respondents to specify their age, many indicated
that they were retired, and one might postulate that such people would be
less comfortable using newer technology to obtain information).
Shareholders’ needs
Parker (1982, p. 285) argues that more needs to be done to discover the
information which readers of the annual report want, rather than attempting
to clarify what they already receive. Like the later L&T study, our ques-
tionnaire sought to ascertainwhat, if any, additional information shareholders
wanted to see included in the annual report. The responses we received tos. a. bartlett & r. a. chandler 258
this question were varied and diYcult to generalize. However, a common
issue raised was that of directors’ remuneration, a reflection of the current
level of public concern. The additional disclosures now required by the
Stock Exchange may go some way towards bridging the gap between the
preparers and readers of annual reports.
The only truly generalizable finding from our survey is the desire among
a majority of shareholders for less information. 57% of our respondents
indicated that they would prefer to receive summary reports rather than the
full annual report; this is similar to the 53·7% finding of Anderson & Epstein
(1995, p. 27) among Australian investors.
LIMITATIONS AND RESERVATIONS
Questionnaire-based research is susceptible to a number of well-known
problems.We outline below the more significant limitations and reservations
of our study.
Non-response bias
With surveys of this type, one recurring problem is how to deal with non-
response bias. L&T in their later study addressed this problem by sending
a short questionnaire to a control group (L&T, 1977, pp. 22–24). The only
significant diVerence between interviewees and questionnaire respondents
related to portfolio size—those who agreed to be interviewed tended to have
larger portfolios than those who completed the questionnaire.
Our approach was to split the respondents into two equal groups (i.e.
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