How to report
method part in
scientific study?
Psy 104
Spring 2025
Structuring an APA methods section
Heading What to include
Participants •Participant or subject characteristics
•Sampling procedures
Materials •Primary and secondary measures
•Quality of measurements
Procedure •Data collection methods
•Research design (e.g., experimental,
correlational, or descriptive)
•Data processing and diagnostics (e.g., outlier
removal)
•Data analysis strategy (e.g., comparison or
regression tests)
Participant or
When discussing people who participate in
research, descriptive terms like “participants,”
“subjects” and “respondents” can be used. For
subject non-human animal research, “subjects” is more
appropriate.
characteristic
s Specify all relevant demographic characteristics of
your participants. This may include their age, sex,
ethnic or racial group, gender identity, education
level, and socioeconomic status.
Depending on your study topic, other
characteristics like educational or immigration
status or language preference may also be
relevant.
Important!
• Be sure to report these characteristics as
precisely as possible. This helps the reader
understand how far your results may be
generalized to other people.
• The APA guidelines emphasize writing about
participants using bias-free language, so it’s
necessary to use inclusive and appropriate
terms.
Sampling procedures
• Outline how the participants were selected and all
inclusion and exclusion criteria applied. Appropriately identify the
sampling procedure used. For example, you should only label a
sample as random if you had access to every member of the
relevant population.
• Of all the people invited to participate in your study, note the
percentage that actually did (if you have this data).
• Additionally, report whether participants were self-selected, either by
themselves or by their institutions (e.g., schools may submit student
data for research purposes).
• Identify any compensation (e.g., course credits or money) that was
provided to participants, and mention any institutional review board
approvals and ethical standards followed.
Materials
• Specify all instruments used in gathering
these measurements and the construct that
they measure.
• These instruments may include hardware,
software, or tests, scales, and inventories.
• To cite hardware, indicate the model
number and manufacturer.
• To cite common software (e.g.,
Qualtrics), state the full name along with
the version number or the website URL.
• To cite tests, scales or inventories,
reference its manual or the article it was
published in. It’s also helpful to state the
number of items and provide one or two
example items.
• For each instrument used, report measures
of the following:
• Reliability: how consistently the method
measures something, in terms of internal
consistency or test-retest reliability.
• Validity: how precisely the method measures
something, in terms of construct validity or
criterion validity.
Quality of measurements
Review all methods you used to assure the quality of your
measurements. These may include:
• training researchers to collect data reliably,
• using multiple people to assess (e.g., observe or code) the data,
• translation and back-translation of research materials,
• using pilot studies to test your materials on unrelated samples.
For data that’s subjectively coded (for example, classifying open-
ended responses), report interrater reliability scores. This tells the
reader how similarly each response was rated by multiple raters.
Procedure
• Report all of the procedures
applied for administering the
study, processing the data,
and for planned data
analyses.
Data collection methods and
research design
• Data collection methods refers to the
general mode of the instruments: surveys,
interviews, observations, focus groups,
neuroimaging, cognitive tests, and so on.
Summarize exactly how you collected the
necessary data.
• Describe all procedures you
applied in administering
surveys, tests, physical
recordings, or imaging
devices, with enough detail
so that someone else can
replicate your techniques.
• If your procedures are very
complicated and require long
descriptions (e.g., in
neuroimaging studies), place
these details in
supplementary materials.
• To report research design, note your
overall framework for data collection
and analysis.
• State whether you used an
experimental, quasi-experimental,
descriptive (observational),
correlational, and/or longitudinal design.
• Also note whether a between-subjects
or a within-subjects design was used.
For multi-group how participants were assigned
to different conditions (e.g.,
studies, report randomization),
the following
design and instructions given to the
procedural participants in each group,
details as well:
interventions for each group,
the setting and length of each
session(s).
Describe whether any masking
was used to hide the condition
assignment (e.g., placebo or
medication condition) from Explain how this masking was
participants or research applied and whether its
administrators. Using masking in effectiveness was assessed.
a multi-group study ensures
internal validity by reducing
research bias.
Analytic strategies
• The methods section is also where you describe
your statistical analysis procedures, but not their
outcomes. Their outcomes are reported in the
results section.
• These procedures should be stated for all primary,
secondary, and exploratory hypotheses.
• While primary and secondary hypotheses are
based on a theoretical framework or past studies,
exploratory hypotheses are guided by the data
you’ve just collected.
• Bhandari, P. (2022, October 17). How to Write an APA Methods Section
| With Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved April 3, 2023, from
https://www.scribbr.com/apa-style/methods-section/
• First, it was assessed whether there were
any baseline differences between the two
groups in terms of demographics
characteristics or AAI scores. Subsequently,
to test our primary hypothesis that the
visualization intervention improves test
performance, we performed an independent
samples t test on test scores.
APA table format
References of the surveys
Scaling
Translation
Software
program to
collect data
Ethical issues
Aim of the current
analyses
Reference
for specific
analysis if its
required
Reporting
results
section
Psy 104/Spring 2025
Results
• The results section of a
quantitative research paper is
where you summarize your
data and report the findings of
any relevant statistical
analyses.
• The APA manual provides
rigorous guidelines for what to
report in quantitative research
papers in the fields of
psychology, education, and
other social sciences.
The results section
should include:
• A summary of the research findings.
• Information about participant flow,
recruitment, retention, and attrition. If some
participants started the study and later left
or failed to complete the study, then this
should be described.
The results section
should include:
• Information about any reasons why some
data might have been excluded from the
study.
• Statistical information including samples
sizes and statistical tests that were used. It
should report standard deviations, p-values,
and other measures of interest.
The Results Should
Justify Your Claims
• Report data in order to
sufficiently justify your
conclusions.
• Since you'll be talking
about your own
interpretation of the
results in the discussion
section, you need to be
sure that the information
reported in the results
section justifies your
claims.
• Remember, you are
summarizing the results of your
psychological study, not
reporting them in full detail.
• The results section should
Summarize be a relatively brief
overview of your findings,
Your Results not a complete presentation
of every single number and
calculation
Report All Relevant
Results
• Your hypothesis may have expected
more statistically significant results,
or your study didn't support your
hypothesis, but that doesn't mean
that the conclusions you reach are
not useful.
• Provide data about what you found in
your results section, then save your
interpretation for what the results
might mean in the discussion section.
• Always assume that your
Report Your readers have a solid
Statistical understanding of statistical
concepts.
Findings • There's no need to explain
what a t-test is or how a
one-way ANOVA works.
• Your responsibility is to
report the results of
your study, not to teach
your readers how to
analyze or interpret
statistics.
Include Tables and Figures
• Your results section should include both text
and illustrations. Presenting data in this way
makes it easier for readers to quickly look
at your results.
• Structure your results section around tables
or figures that summarize the results of
your statistical analysis.
What Not to Include
• Don't draw cause-effect conclusions.
Avoid making any claims suggesting that
your result "proves" that something is true.
• Present the data without editorializing
it. Save your comments and interpretations
for the discussion section of your paper.
• But don't include statistics without
narration. The results section should not be
a number dump. Instead, you should
sequentially narrate what these numbers
mean.
What Not to Include
• Don't include the raw data in the results
section. The results section should be a concise
presentation of the results. If there is raw data
that would be useful, include it in the appendix.
• Don't only rely on descriptive text. Use
tables and figures to present these findings when
appropriate.
• Don't present the same data twice in your
illustrative materials. If you have already
presented some data in a table, don't present it
again in a figure. If you have presented data in a
figure, don't present it again in a table.
What Not to Include
• Don't feel like you have to include
everything. If there is data that is not
relevant to the research question, don't
include it in the results section.
• But don't leave out results because
they don't support your claims.
Even if your data did not support your
hypothesis, it is important to include it
in your findings if it's relevant.
More Tips for Writing a
Results Section
• Use the past tense. The results section
should be written in the past tense.
• Be concise and objective. You will have the
opportunity to give your own interpretations of
the results in the discussion section.
• Use APA format. As you are writing your
results section, keep a style guide on hand.
The Publication Manual of the American
Psychological Association is the official source
for APA style.
More Tips for Writing a
Results Section
• Visit your library. Read some journal
articles that are on your topic. Pay
attention to how the authors present
the results of their research.
• Get a second opinion. If possible,
take your paper to your school's
writing lab for additional assistance.
Reporting Statistics in APA Style
(by Dr. Jeffrey Kahn, Illinois State University)
Mean and Standard Deviation are most clearly
presented in parentheses:
The sample as a whole was relatively young (M =
19.22, SD = 3.45).
The average age of students was 19.22 years (SD =
3.45).
Percentages are also most clearly displayed in
parentheses with no decimal places:
Nearly half (49%) of the sample was married.
Chi-Square statistics are reported with
degrees of freedom and sample size in
parentheses,
the Pearson chi-square value (rounded to
two decimal places), and the significance
level:
The percentage of participants that
were married did not differ by
gender, c2(1, N = 90) = 0.89, p > .05.
T Tests are reported like chi-squares, but only the degrees of freedom are in parentheses.
Following that, report the t statistic (rounded to two decimal places) and the significance
level.
There was a significant effect for gender, t(54) = 5.43, p < .001, with men
receiving higher scores than women.
ANOVAs (both one-way and two-way) are reported like the t test, but there are two
degrees-of-freedom numbers to report.
First report the between-groups degrees of freedom, then report the within-groups
degrees of freedom (separated by a comma).
After that report the F statistic (rounded off to two decimal places) and the
significance level.
There was a significant main effect for treatment, F(1, 145) = 5.43, p < .01,
and a significant interaction, F(2, 145) = 3.13, p < .05.
Correlations are reported with the
degrees of freedom (which is N-2) in
parentheses and the significance level:
The two variables were strongly
correlated, r(55) = .49, p < .01.
Regression results are often best presented in a table.
APA doesn't say much about how to report regression results in the text, but if you
would like to report the regression in the text of your Results section, you should at
least present the standardized slope (beta) along with the t-test and the
corresponding significance level.
(Degrees of freedom for the t-test is N-k-1 where k equals the number of predictor
variables.)
It is also customary to report the percentage of variance explained along with the
corresponding F test.
Social support significantly predicted depression scores, b = -.34, t(225) =
6.53, p < .01. Social support also explained a significant proportion of variance in
depression scores, R2 = .12, F(1, 225) = 42.64, p < .01.
