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When presenting each individual result in an APA-style report, researchers generally follow a structured narrative approach to ensure clarity, even for readers who skip the statistical numbers. This structure involves reminding the reader of the specific research question, providing the answer to the question in words, presenting the relevant statistics to support that answer, qualifying the answer if necessary, and finally summarizing the result.

Discussing Individual Results in APA Style

In APA-style writing, a general rule is to use words for numbers under $$10$$ and numerals for numbers $$10$$ and above. However, there is a strict exception for precise statistical results: they must always be written as numerals, regardless of whether they are less than $$10$$. Furthermore, these statistical numerals are typically rounded to two decimal places (e.g., $$2.00$$ instead of two).

Presenting Numbers in APA Style

When writing an APA-style results section, statistical values can be integrated directly into the narrative sentence or placed within parentheses at the end of a statement, similar to a citation. If there are only a small number of results to report, it is often most efficient to write them out in the text. When a statistic is described in the narrative text, its name is fully spelled out (e.g., mean, standard deviation). Conversely, if the statistic is reported inside parentheses, researchers must use its standard abbreviation or symbol (e.g., $$M$$, $$SD$$).

Narrative versus Parenthetical Statistics

When comparing similar results across different groups or conditions in a research report, it is crucial to use parallel construction. This writing technique involves formatting comparable statistical findings using the exact same sentence structure. Presenting data with parallel phrasing makes it significantly easier for the reader to quickly contrast the numbers and understand the overall pattern without getting confused by varying grammatical structures.

Parallel Construction in Reporting Results

According to the structured narrative approach for presenting individual results in an APA-style report, arrange the following steps in their typical order.

A researcher is writing the Results section of an APA-style report and has just finished stating the specific research question being addressed. According to the structured narrative approach for presenting individual results, what should the researcher do immediately next?

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