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Intro | APA Style

General Rules for Results Sections

Purpose of Results Sections

The APA manual describes appropriate strategies for presenting statistical information. These guidelines were established to provide basic minimal standards and to provide some uniformity across studies.

In general, your results section should effectively communicate the findings of the study.

  • To provide context for the statistics that will follow, incorporate language about the variable(s) under study.
  • To clarify what you did to analyze the results, identify the statistical procedures used.
  • To highlight the implications of the analyses for the hypotheses, provide simple interpretations of the analyses.

Statistical Information to Include

Significance testing “is but a starting point and that additional reporting elements such as effect sizes, confidence intervals, and extensive description are needed to convey the most complete meaning of the results” (p. 87).

  1. Descriptive statistics are essential and “such a set usually includes at least the following: the per-cell sample sizes, bserved cell means (or frequencies of cases in each category for a categorical variable), and the cell standard deviations” (p. 88).
  2. For statistical significance tests, “include the obtained magnitude or value of the test statistic, the degrees of freedom, the probability of obtaining a value as extreme as or more extreme than the one obtained (the exact p value)” (p. 88).
  3. When possible, confidence intervals should be emphasized. “It can be extremely effective to include confidence intervals (for estimates of parameters; functions of parameters such as differences in means; and effect sizes) when reporting results.” (p. 88).
  4. “For the reader to appreciate the magnitude or importance of a study’s findings, it is almost always necessary to include some measure of effect size” (p. 89). These can be in the original (raw) units or in a standardized metric.

Information in Text versus Data Displays

In complex studies, information can be presented in the text, in tables, or in figures. Generally speaking, present the information in the manner that efficiently conveys the information and maximizes understanding.

  • Simple studies might not need to include a table or figure associated with the analyses. “The results of a single statistical test or a few group means and stnadard deviations can be presented in text” (p. 196).
  • The more analyses you have, the likely it is that they should be presented in a table or figure. “A table or figure is an effective choice to present the results of multiple statistical tests or many descriptive statistics” (p. 196). The table should be referred to in the text.

Note. All quotations pertaining to reporting results are taken from: American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th Ed.). Washington, DC: APA.