How To Write Research Report – APA Format
APA research sample guideline:
Introduction
Do not type the word “Introduction” at the top of this page — instead, just type the title of the manuscript, in upper and lower case, centered left to right. On the first double-spaced line after the title, start the text of the introduction, left-aligned. Indent the first line of every paragraph.
This section of your manuscript should introduce the reader to the research question(s) that you are posing. Why did you conduct this research? How is your research different from that which has already been done addressing the same or similar questions?
Usually the introduction starts out broad and then narrows in scope. You should review the relevant literature, but not exhaustively. A review article may include an exhaustive and critical review of the literature, but you are not writing a review article, you are writing a research article.
You should end the introduction with a statement of the purpose and rationale of the research you conducted. If your research is not strictly exploratory, you should indicate what results you expected and why you expected such results (based on theoretical considerations and/or the known results of other research you have cited earlier in the introduction. If your research is exploratory, and you had, prior to conducting the research, no idea how the results would come out, say that.
Citations
Whenever you refer to the work of another or when you present information that you obtained from another source, you must cite that person/source. You must indicate the source in the text (body of the manuscript) with a brief notation and in the References section of the manuscript in more detail. There must be a one-to-one correspondence between the citations in the text and the entries in the References section — that is, every source that is cited in the text must also be listed in the References section and vice versa.
Headings
A research manuscript can have one to five different levels of headings, but for the typical single-experiment manuscript, two levels should suffice.
Usually you will not need any subheadings in your introductory section, usually you will in your Methods section, and sometimes you will in your Discussion section.
Method
After you finish the introductory section, hit the Enter key and type the word “Method” on the next line. In a typical one-experiment manuscript (with one, two, or three levels of headings), the headings that describe the major sections of the body of the manuscript (Methods, Results, Discussion) will be Level 1 headings, which are Centered, Boldface, Uppercase and Lowercase. Do not put in a hard page break between the introduction and the next section (unless the journal for which you are preparing the manuscript wants page breaks between sections — a few do, but most do not).
In the Methods section you describe in detail how you gathered the data. The Methods section is usually divided into subsections.
Participants or Subjects or Research Units. Here you need to identify the units you studied and how you sampled them. When the research units are humans, they are most often referred to as “participants.” You should report demographic characteristics of your participants, such as sex, age, ethnic identity, and any other available demographics that might help readers determine to what populations your results may generalize well.
Although not typically done in the past, it is a good idea to include in your Method section information on the a priori power analysis that you employed to decide how many subjects should be in your study. For example, you might report that an a priori power analysis indicated that you needed to have 124 subjects in each of your two groups to have 80% power for detecting a medium sized effect when employing the traditional .05 criterion of statistical significance.
Design. Sometimes it is helpful to have a separate section in which you identify the research design that you employed, example “2 x 2 factorial design. You should identify the variables which you manipulated or measured. In non-experimental research, you should identify which variable(s) is(are) the criterion variable(s) and which variable(s) is(are) the predictor variable(s).
In experimental research you identify which variables were treated as independent variables and which as dependent. You should not use the terms “independent variable” and “dependent variable” when describing non-experimental research. You may identify which variables, if any, are treated as covariates. If your statistical analysis involves the testing of hypotheses, it is good form to identify here the decision rule used (most often a .05 criterion of statistical significance).
Materials. Here you describe the instruments used for manipulating and measuring variables. If you are employing standardized tests, briefly describe their psychometric characteristics (such as reliability) as know from past research (later, in the Results section, you should report the results of psychometric analysis conducted on the data used in your current study).
Procedure. Here you provide enough detail on the process of data collection to allow another person to repeat your research. How were groups formed, what instructions were given to subjects, how did you manipulate independent variables and measure other variables, and so on.
Results
The “Results” heading should be typed on the first double-spaced line following the last line of the Method section (no hard page break). If the design and analysis are complex, it may be helpful to break the Results section into subsections.
If you need help in SPSS or interpreting your results, CONTACT US for SPSS or research tuition
Descriptive Statistics. Report whatever descriptive statistics (means, standard deviations, correlation coefficients, regression parameters, percentages, and the like) are necessary to support statistical conclusions which are made. While your interest may be mostly with measures of central tendency or location (means and medians), be sure also to present measures of variability/dispersion (standard deviations, range statistics, estimates of error variance).
Tests of Statistical Significance. Usually a Results section includes presentation of the statistics that are used to test statistical hypotheses. For parametric analysis, these include z, t, F, and χ2. The degrees of freedom should be given for statistics which have degrees of freedom. For most statistics which have degrees of freedom, there is a simple relationship between sample size (N) and degrees of freedom, so if you have given degrees of freedom, then you do not need to report the N on which that test was based. This is not true, however, of the χ2 statistic in its most common applications, so one generally reports both degrees of freedom and N with χ2.
Estimates of Effect Size. The APA now strongly recommends the inclusion of estimates of the strength of effects reported in research manuscript. Among the more commonly employed strength of effect estimators are Cohen’s d, r2, η2, ω2, and odds ratios.
Confidence Intervals. Several prominent statisticians have decried the misuse of NHST (null hypothesis significance testing, that is, statistical hypothesis inference testing) and recommended the reporting of confidence intervals rather than (or at least in addition to) reporting tests of statistical significance. The APA also strongly recommends the use of confidence intervals. Example: Bootstrapped confidence intervals (95%) were computed using David Howell’s resampling software (Howell, 2002). As shown in Table 1, anti-misbehavior signage, combined with increased monitoring by lab attendants, reduced computer misbehavior in the lab.
Confidence Intervals for Effect Size Estimates. Example:
- An η2 which differs significantly from zero at the .05 level can have a 95% confidence interval that includes zero.
Discussion
The “Discussion” heading should be typed on the first double-spaced line following the last line of the Results section (no hard page break). In this section you relate your results to your hypotheses (if you had hypotheses) and you discuss the theoretical and practical implications of your results. You may point out similarities and differences between your results and those which have been obtained by others who conducted similar research. If there are limitations to your research which you think should be mentioned, this is the place to do so. Often the results of research raise questions that call for additional research. If you wish to suggest additional research that would logically follow from your results, you can do so in the discussion section — but if you plan on doing that additional research yourself, you had better get started on it soon, or else somebody else will read your discussion and take your suggestion and do that follow-up research before you do it.
References
After finishing your discussion section, with the cursor at the end of the last page of discussion, hold down the Ctrl key and hit the Enter key. This will put in a hard page break. This should be the first hard page break you have used since you put one between the abstract and the introduction. Type the word “References” centered on the first line of the new page and then give bibliographic information for every resource which you cited in the body of the manuscript. Notice that hanging indentation is used in the reference list — that is, in each paragraph (one reference) each line except the first is indented.
Please note that there must be a one-to-one correspondence between the reference list and the citations in the body of the manuscript. Each source cited in the body of the manuscript must be included in the reference list and each item in the reference list must be cited in the body of the manuscript at least once.
Notice that the titles of journals and books and the volume numbers of journals are set in italic font. To produce italic font in Word you just highlight the text to be set in italic font and then hold down the Ctrl key while you hit the I key.
Appendixes
An appendix is used to present details that would be distracting were they presented in the body of the article. For example, if your research included a questionnaire that you developed, you might include a copy of that questionnaire in an appendix.
If there is an appendix, it starts on a new page following the last page of the references. The first line of the first page says “Appendix” (centered). On the next line type the title of the appendix, in upper and lower case, centered. If there is more than one appendix, identify them as “Appendix A,” “Appendix B,” et cetera, ordering them in the same order to which they were referred in the body of the manuscript.
Footnotes
Footnotes are strongly discouraged by the APA. If used, for example to acknowledge having received permission to quote, they are presented on a new page that immediately follows the author note page.
Tables
Each table is put on a separate page, with the first table following the footnotes (or, more commonly, the author note, when there are no footnotes). The first line of each table page is “Table n,” where “n” is the number of the table. The next line is the title of the table, in upper and lower case, italic font. If you are going to use a table, you should find an example of a table (in a published article or one of my handouts) whose architecture would be appropriate for the material you wish to include in your table and then you should model your table after that table.
Number your tables in the same order to which they are referred to in the body of the manuscript. Do be sure to refer to each table in the body of the manuscript.
Microsoft Word provides powerful tools for making tables, but learning to use them takes some time.