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The results section of an APA-style research report is where the main findings of the study, including the outcomes of statistical analyses, are formally presented. While this section summarizes the data to answer the research questions, it does not include the raw data—such as individual participants' specific responses or scores. However, researchers are ethically expected to preserve their raw data and make them available to other researchers upon request, often by sharing them in open online repositories.

APA Results Section

Although the APA results section lacks standard subsections, it must follow a logical organizational progression. It typically begins by addressing preliminary issues, such as clarifying whether any participants or responses were excluded from the analysis and the rationale for doing so. It also explains how multiple responses were combined to compute the primary variables and reports the outcomes of any manipulation checks. Once these preliminary issues are established, the section systematically tackles the primary research questions, often organizing them from the most general question to more specific ones.

Organization of the APA Results Section

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

Tables are highly effective tools for presenting substantial amounts of precise data concisely in an APA-style academic manuscript. Following general APA formatting principles, tables must introduce important new information rather than merely repeating data from the text, be designed as simply as possible, and be fully interpretable on their own without requiring the reader to reference the surrounding narrative.

APA Style Tables

When writing the results section of an APA-style manuscript, researchers should avoid unnecessarily repeating precise statistical data that is already clearly displayed in a table or figure. Instead, the narrative text should be utilized to alert the reader to major trends, highlight specific correlations of interest, and draw attention to significant details that are visually summarized in the accompanying graphs and tables.

Referencing Tables and Figures in Text

When writing the results section of an APA-style research report, how should a researcher handle the study's raw data (such as individual participants' specific scores)?

In an APA-style research report, it is acceptable to omit the formal outcomes of statistical analyses from the results section, provided that the raw data is shared in an open online repository.

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