Summarization following this principle means that the reader can use experience and basic knowledge to explain the representation. A concept reflects the recognition of a physical object, an event or the abstraction of some objects or events. It can be regarded as a kind of computing, which inputs data of various types (e.g., a sentence or data obtained from sensors) and generates a model of the data. To test the third hypothesis, namely whether citizens would better understand accounting information presented with infographics compared to the traditional way of reporting, respondents were asked to answer a set of specific questions, as discussed in the methodology section. Thus, it is important to assess with an additional test whether the level of understanding had been actually improved (i.e. the actual understanding).

Among the six ATD viewpoints, the ATD-related Component viewpoint received the highest score, since (i) this viewpoint does not introduce new concepts, and (ii) they are more interested in this viewpoint as components are more related to the daily work of most of the case study participants. Citizens prefer infographics to traditional accounting reports for the presentation of accounting information. The study of infographics use in accounting literature is very recent and mainly deals with nonpurely financial accounting reporting in the private sector (Malola and Maroun, 2019; Kanbaty et al., 2020).

understandable American Dictionary

The creation of the two subgroups was decided as the number of participants falling within the five separate sub categories is not homogenous and therefore treating the accounting knowledge and familiarity variable as a continuous variable might not be suitable for statistical analysis. The first subgroup included those who had very low to medium knowledge of accounting and very low to medium familiarity with financial statements and the second subgroup those who would score themselves above average in both dimensions. This resulted in a sample of 91 respondents in the first group and 85 respondents in the second. Mann–Whitney U Tests were run to analyze whether the level of accounting knowledge affects users’ perceived understanding in these two subsamples (Table 5).

Firstly, infographics do not seem to be a standalone solution for improving the understandability and subsequently, the usability of accounting information in the public sector (van Helden and Reichard, 2019). Based on the empirical evidence, infographics increase the perception of understanding of the financial numbers, thus making financial data more attractive. Nonetheless, infographics do not increase financial reporting understandability per se, except in case they are related to graphs with trends.

Questions & More Information

There is a consensus in accounting literature that, in the public sector, accounting information should be focused on accountability to stakeholders and decision-making support (IPSASB, J., 2014; GASB, 1987; van Helden and Reichard, 2019; da Silva Nogueira and Jorge, 2017). A broad group of users of accounting information in the public sector has been identified, including managers and politicians, citizens, creditors and lenders, oversight and regulatory boards and media. Thus, accountability to citizens goes hand in hand with the production of accrual-based financial statements (Cohen et al., 2013). The first hypothesis to test is to compare the information presented in financial statements under the typical format with that of infographics to understand participant preferences. In order to compare the assessments of participants to both presentation formats, a Wilcoxon signed-rank test has been performed. Wilcoxon signed-rank test is a nonparametric test (i.e. it does not assume a normal distribution of the data) that is used to compare two sets of measurements that originate from the same sample to assess whether their population means are different.

The paper presents an exploratory research conducted among samples of citizens in three European countries that share similarities in the use of accrual accounting, administrative systems and citizen accountability orientation (Bastida et al., 2022). The novelty of the research consists in its ability to give voice to citizens’ preferences regarding the way financial information, related to both financial performance and financial condition, is presented. In parallel, it analyses the effect of accounting knowledge on the understandability of financial information under different presentation formats. Moreover, it is the first study that analyses the use of infographics in public sector financial reporting.

In other words, respondents did not provide more correct answers to specific questions by using infographics compared to the traditional financial statements. On the contrary, the information presented via the traditional financial statements seems to be in essence better understood or at least understood at the same level. Then, the respondents were asked to access the financial statements presented through infographics and repeat the same process. Following the aforementioned example, the question would be whether the local government was more indebted in year X+1 compared to year X. In this way, we expected that the respondents could not rely on their previous given answers in the part of the questionnaire referring to traditional financial statements and they had to study the infographic reports to give a new informed answer.

An example feature diagram of a feature-oriented robot system is depicted in Fig. For probabilistic and dynamic feature-oriented systems, Dubslaff et al. [1005,1006] introduced a compositional modeling and analysis framework. Here, operational behaviors of features are described through MDPs with further feature information.

The scores attained by respondents claiming very low to medium accounting knowledge did not significantly improve nor deteriorated with the use of infographics. The results are in line with those found by Young and Hinesly (2014) when comparing text and infographics for business communication, where there were no differences in the understanding of information between respondents reading text and infographics. However, even though there is no actual improvement in the understanding understandability of accounting information, respondents with up to average accounting knowledge had the impression of better understanding. This finding is important in relevance to popular reports, that are addressed to citizens (Cohen et al., 2017; Biancone et al., 2016; Manes-Rossi et al., 2019). More studies are needed to assess whether citizens understand better the information disclosed in these reports or due to their more user-friendly layout they have the impression of understanding.

• David (the Developer) and Sean (the Business Stakeholder) negotiated the quality of the software component called Financial Report Generator (FRG).
• Most of them share the idea that causes raise the probabilities for their effects and rely on a formalization using conditional probabilities.
• In this study, we use infographics as a form of visualization, introducing therefore in the public sector reporting research era a visual means not yet studied.
• Our ability to effectively exercise that great power often falls short on a very surprising limitation —our ability to know our own creations.
• The paper presents the results of an exploratory analysis conducted with the participation of a group of citizens in three European countries through a questionnaire.

Most approaches towards explanation frameworks aim at understandability at design-time. There is, however, only very little work on systems with integrated explanation mechanisms that inform the user at run-time. We briefly revisit existing work on notions of causality, counterexample-based causality, certification, and feature-oriented systems. As shown in Table 5.17, the ATD Detail viewpoint received an average score of 6.8, while each of the other viewpoints received an average score above eight. These scores indicate good understandability of the ATD viewpoints, considering that the case study participants spent only 40 min (as described in Table 5.15) on learning the viewpoints.