Unit 5: Appendixes and Tables and Figures

In Unit 4, you learned about the basic components of an APA-style paper. In this unit, we will review the key elements of the results section of such papers. It is in this section that you describe and report on your data analyses (findings) in text and present appendixes, tables, and figures. Many term papers you write will not require an appendix, table, or figure, but some research papers will call for one or all three of these. A more complicated study with several analyses might require all three.

It is often a daunting task for those who are new to APA format and psychological research to properly present the findings of a research study. At the conception of a study, the basic research question may seem straightforward. For example, a researcher may ask: How much time will elapse after witnessing an emergency before a witness takes action (e.g., calls the police)? An entire paper may then be written to address this question. Recall from Unit 4 that specific information will be included in each major section of such a research paper.

APA TIP: A research paper in the context of this tutorial may differ in nature from a research paper written for publication purposes. Please check with your instructor to determine exactly what type of paper you are writing and what components of the paper he or she requires you to include.

Also recall that a research paper must read like a recipe so that any reader will be able to replicate the study's findings. This requirement means that you, the author, must explain in detail the variables used in the research study.

For the purpose of replication, it is equally as important to report the outcome of a study as it is to describe the methodology. The findings of a study are reported in the results section of the paper and will generally include the following:

APA TIP: There are many more statistical analyses that may be performed than are highlighted in this tutorial. Please refer to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA, 2009, pp. 116–123) for more examples.

How Do I Say All of That?

Borrowing from an example in Unit 4 of this tutorial, imagine your teacher has assigned your class a group activity to examine the concept of bystander apathy (Garcia, Weaver, Moskowitz, & Darley, 2002; Darley & Latané, as cited in Kulis, 2004; Sagarin & Lawler-Sagarin, 2005). Your research paper will address the research question: Does reaction time in responding to an emergency vary in the presence of other bystanders?

For the purpose of this tutorial, suppose your teacher has given you background information for the phenomenon in question, which you will include as part of the introduction to your research paper. She has also helped you create the research and statistical designs of this study, both of which will be clearly detailed in the method section of your paper. Further, she gives you data previously collected and analyzed in a controlled experiment that measured spectators' reaction time to an emergency event. It will be your class's task to report the findings of that experiment in a research paper.

In the experiment your teacher described to you, two groups of individuals were compared on how quickly each of them came to the aid of a woman who fainted. Half of these participants were randomly assigned to a condition in which there was one other person present. The other half of the participants were randomly assigned to a condition in which there were five other people present.

Stating Your Hypotheses

The hypothesis you and your classmates will attempt to support is that reaction time to an emergency event will increase as a function of other bystanders' presence (i.e., the more witnesses there are to an emergency, the longer it will take a single individual to respond to the event).

When stating your research hypothesis (i.e., the statement you attempt to support with your research), you must always include the variables used in your study and the way you measured them.

You must also state a null hypothesis in your paper. The null hypothesis is the statement you are actually testing when you conduct an inferential-statistical test. It is generally the negation of the research hypothesis. For this example, each hypothesis would read something like those below.

In the experiment just outlined, 25 people were randomly assigned to the one-person condition of the IV, and 25 different people were randomly assigned to the five-person condition of this same variable. An inferential-statistical test called the Independent Samples t-Test was performed for this experiment, and your teacher has provided you with the raw data (i.e., the reaction time for all 50 participants) and the outcome of this analysis. The findings indicate that it indeed took longer for a person to respond to the emergency when more bystanders were present.

How Do You Say All of This in Text?

Students tend to report every single data point in the results section because most students are either unfamiliar with correct APA format for reporting results or because they are afraid to omit an important detail.

Imagine one of your classmates, erring on the side of caution, reported the data in Figure 5.1 in his or her results section.

It appears that no detail has been left unreported in these raw data. What is problematic about this student's presentation of the results?

The appropriate way to report results in a research paper is to include a brief in-text summary of what analysis (if any) was conducted. Be sure to remind your reader what variables were used in the study and to report only the most salient finding(s) of the statistical analysis both in English and in statistical notation.

When presenting the results of an analysis, several pieces of information should be presented: (a) the IV and the DV, (b) the group means and SDs, (c) whether the test was significant, and (d) if significant, the direction of the effect.

For example, your class activity requires you to compare the reaction time to an emergency event between two groups of people using an Independent Samples t-Test. To review, your teacher has calculated a mean reaction time for participants who were assigned to the one-person condition of the IV and a mean reaction time for participants who were assigned to the five-person condition of the same variable. The Independent Samples t-Test will allow you to determine whether the two means are significantly different taking into account other factors such as the sample size and variability in scores.

Your teacher has reviewed the statistical analysis with your class, and you have collectively determined there was indeed a significant difference between groups. Therefore, in your research paper, you might write up your results as shown in Figure 5.2.

It is common for those new to APA format to state merely that there was a significant effect. However, this statement alone does not tell the reader the direction of the effect.

Grammar Check: The word effect is a noun that means the result, the consequence, or the outcome. The word affect is a verb that means to influence or to change (as a noun, the word affect means mood).

APA Focus: Identify Results of a Study

The findings in Figure 5.2 reveal very pointed details of the experiment. Was a statistically significant difference found?

Reveal Answer

To complete the in-text report above, statistical notation should be presented that tells the reader the statistical test used, information about the sample size in the form of degrees of freedom (df), the statistic generated by the analysis, and whether or not results of the analysis showed a significant effect.

APA TIP: A detailed explanation regarding level of significance (i.e., probability of significance) is beyond the scope of this tutorial. Please refer to an undergraduate statistics textbook for further guidance.

The correct statistical notation for the data in our example is represented in Figure 5.3.

Much information is presented in Figure 5.3. The first piece of information represents the statistical test being reported (i.e., a t-Test). There were 48 df in the study, which was calculated by subtracting one data point from each of the two samples compared (i.e., 25 – 1 = 24 in each sample).

The next two pieces of information convey the actual outcome of the analysis: 12.23 denotes the obtained t Statistic of the analysis, and .01 corresponds to the significance level for the analysis. The probability (p) of having obtained a t-Statistic of this magnitude by chance is equal to .01 (i.e., one percent).

APA TIP: Remember, a probability of less than .05 usually indicates a statistically significant difference between means compared. Most statistical software used for analyses will give you the exact probability value (e.g., p = .01).

Grammar Check: When a finding is not statistically significant, the term nonsignficant is used. This term does not imply a finding is not important; rather it implies that no statistical difference was found.

To review then, a number of important details must be included in text (i.e., specifically in the results section of a research paper) to convey the study's findings. This information must be provided in English and in statistical notation.

Figure 5.4 includes both English and statistical notation for the results of the t-Test conducted. In the experiment, on average, it took the participants who were in the five-person condition 91.08 seconds to respond to a woman who fainted, whereas it took the participants who were in the one-person condition only 41.68 seconds.

Note that in addition to the mean for each group, the SD for each group was included in the results. Why is it important to provide that information?

How Do I Report the Results of Another Analysis?

Your teacher may ask you to report the results of more than one statistical analysis. The results of a second analysis would be reported in much the same way as the results of the first.

The first analysis in this example indicated a significant difference in reaction time between participants in each experimental condition (i.e., the one-person vs. the five-person conditions). Imagine that your teacher has asked you to determine whether or not there is a significant correlation between the participants' age and how long it took them to come to the aid of the woman who fainted.

A correlational analysis generates a different statistic than a t-Test. There are several types of correlational analyses one can perform, although the most common generates the Pearson Product-Moment Correlation Coefficient (correlation coefficient). The symbol for this statistic is r. Please refer to an undergraduate statistics textbook for additional information on correlation coefficients.

In this example, there are two variables under consideration for the correlational analysis: the first is age (in years), and the second is reaction time (in seconds). An analysis reveals the following information:

Figure 5.5 shows the results for this analysis in English and in statistical notation.

Notice the findings of the correlational analysis immediately follow the t-Test results. Why is there no page break between these two results?

Remember, only the outcome of data analyses is included in the results section of an APA paper. The discussion is the section in which you will interpret what these results mean. How might you interpret the results of the two analyses highlighted in this example?

It appears that age is not a factor in the length of time taken to assist an individual in need. The number of bystanders present seems to have determined how long each participant took before deciding to assist the woman who fainted, which indicates that when more onlookers are present during an emergency, an individual might be less inclined to come to another person's aid.

The remaining sections of this unit will show you other conventions for reporting results in an APA paper.

Create and Present Tables

Tables immediately follow the last appendix in an APA paper, and each table appears on its own page (i.e., by inserting a page break). If there are no appendixes in your paper, the table(s) will follow the reference list.

In general, a table is a good way to present numbers in a manner that allows your reader a quick overview of your data. The appendix shown in Figure 5.6 is not a good example of an APA-style table; that table is not in the correct format, nor is it organized, condensed, or summarized for your reader.

You may wonder why tables must be included in a paper. Why not simply present the data in text? Let's take the example in Figure 5.7.

Yikes! The sentence in Figure 5.6 is much too long. In addition to some grammatical errors, the sentence also contains far too much information for your reader to fully appreciate; no discernable pattern is revealed by reporting the data in this format.

An APA table should be easy to understand and have a clear title. For instance, a title like the following is too wordy and should be avoided:

The Mean Reaction Time Broken Down by Gender of Participants in a Between-Groups Study of the Bystander Apathy Phenomenon with a One-Person Condition and a Five-Person Condition.

Figure 5.7 recasts as a table the descriptive statistics (i.e., means and SDs) that were presented in Figure 5.6.

A glance at this table quickly uncovers a pattern in the data (i.e., as more onlookers were present, reaction time increased), and this pattern appears to be more exaggerated for males than for females (also note that males, in general, had slightly higher reaction latencies than females). SD increased across conditions as well. What might this indicate?

Each table in your paper should be labeled as Table (flush-left), followed by an Arabic numeral (e.g., 1, 2, 3, and so forth). As was true of multiple appendixes, the tables are numbered based on the order in which they are mentioned in text. We have presented only one table in this example; notice that unlike a single appendix, a single table does get numbered (e.g., Table 1).

The title for each table is always put in italics. A general note has been added beneath the table to clarify the values presented in the table. The purpose of using notes is to avoid cramming information into each cell of your table.

The rules for number and format of columns, rows, headings, and notes vary depending on the type of information you present in a table. Some tables are more complex than others; please refer to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA, 2009, pp. 128–150, 151, 230) for more assistance with these rules.

Often, neither an appendix nor a table will adequately represent your data. In the next section, we will discuss the utility of figures to illustrate your data.

Create and Present Figures

Sometimes a picture can depict trends in a data set more clearly than either an appendix or a table. These pictures are referred to as figures. You are probably most familiar with the term graph. In APA format, a graph is only one type of figure you may use. Figures always follow tables in an APA paper; if you have no tables, then figure will follow the reference list after a page break (APA, 2009, pp. 150–167).

Figure Captions

Figure captions are necessary to both identify and explain the figures you use. A caption, which serves as the figure's title, always appears beneath its corresponding figure. The convention to number figures is similar to that for numbering tables, although each label is put into italics and is followed by a period; use Arabic numerals (e.g., Figure 1., Figure 2., and so forth).

How Do I Know What Type of Figure to Use in My Paper?

You will more than likely use a graph to present data in your paper, although the type of figure you use will largely depend on the kind of information you are attempting to convey. For the purpose of this example, we will present two figures to pictorially represent the data discussed earlier in this unit.

Figure 5.8 shows an example of figure and caption relevant to our example (i.e., the mean reaction time [in seconds] of participants according to gender).

Figure 5.8 is a bar chart. A bar chart is generally most appropriate to use when one of your variables is categorical (i.e., measured on a nominal scale) as gender is in this example. Notice that each axis of the figure is clearly and simply labeled. Why is it important to label each axis?

Reaction time is represented on the vertical or Y-axis and is labeled in units of measure (i.e., seconds). Gender is represented on the horizontal, or X-axis. The height of each bar indicates the mean reaction time for females versus males. An error bar is included above to provide a visual measure of SD for each mean. (NOTE: the comparison in Figure 5.8 does not represent a significant difference between females and males on reaction time measures; the figure was included in this tutorial for illustrative purposes only).

A different type of figure called a scatter plot can be used to describe the results of a correlational analysis. Figure 5.9 represents the correlation between mean reaction time (in seconds) and mean age (in years). This correlation was nonsignificant, as indicated by the analysis described earlier in this unit and by the scatter plot below.

Note that each of these axes is as clearly labeled as those in the bar chart. In this figure, each data point represents participants' scores on both age (in years) and mean reaction time (in seconds). The line drawn through the data is referred to as a regression line or best-fitting line.

APA TIP: Several software programs are available to create figures (i.e., graphs). Please refer to the Publication Manual of the APA (APA, 2009, pp. 150–167) for details on different figures used.

Create and Present Appendixes

Although it is inappropriate to include an entire data set in your results section, you may include the raw data as an appendix. Appendixes immediately follow the reference list of an APA paper. Each appendix starts on a new page (i.e., by inserting a page break).

Should you include more than one appendix to your paper, you must label each in successive, alphabetical order (e.g., Appendix A, Appendix B, and so on). You must also refer your reader to each appendix included by adding a statement in text (e.g., please see Appendix C). Each appendix should be labeled in the order in which you mention it in your paper.

What material other than a raw data set do you think can be included as an appendix?

In the current example, we will include only one appendix. There is no need to distinguish a single appendix with an alphabetic label. The format for one appendix is shown in Figure 5.10.

Notice the appendix is labeled Appendix (centered) and includes a title. Each appendix you attach to your paper will also have a title.

Why is information like that shown in Figure 5.10 appropriate to include as an appendix and not as text?

There are slightly different formats for appendixes depending on what type of information is presented in each. Please refer to the Publication Manual of the APA (APA, 2009, pp. 38–40) for more specific details.

Some information is easier to understand when presented in tabular format than in an appendix. In the next section, we will discuss how and why to use a table in your APA paper.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road

Students often become disoriented in reading or writing the results section of an APA paper. One source of confusion is in determining the order in which results should be presented. Another area of uncertainty is in making sense of the results presented.

It is very common to become lost in the appendixes, tables, and figures presented. This bewilderment frequently renders the results and the discussion sections of a paper somewhat incomplete as students drift from the verbal meaning of a finding into a maze of statistics and symbols.

It is vital to walk your reader through your results in a logical progression, but you must not forget what the results mean in English. The activity below may assist you in guiding your reader to the intended destination of your study: your conclusion.

Follow the yellow-brick road by clicking on the section of the road that corresponds to the information in the box below the road.

The Results of the Experiment Highlighted in This Unit Suggest The Following

1. An individual seems to wait longer to assist a person in need when there are more onlookers present than when that individual is alone.

2. The delay in responding to an emergency does not seem to be related to the age of the participant.

3. There is no significant difference between men and women in the length of time it takes to respond to an emergency.

4. When in the presence of more onlookers, there appears to be more indecision about coming to the assistance of a person in need than when there are fewer onlookers.

5. One interpretation of the findings is that people feel less responsible to act in an emergency when in the presence of a crowd.

6. One implication of this study is that a person in need of assistance is less likely to be helped by a crowd rather than an individual.

References

American Psychological Association. (2009). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed., second printing). Washington, DC: Author.

Garcia, S. M., Weaver, K., Moskowitz, G. B., & Darley, J. M. (2002). Crowded minds: The implicit bystander effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(4), 843–853. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.83.4.843

Kulis, J. V. (2004). The beauty of intervention. Professional Safety, 49(9), 41–43. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database.

Sagarin, B. J., & Lawler-Sagarin, K. (2005). Critically evaluating competing theories: An exercise based on the Kitty Genovese murder. Teaching of Psychology, 32(3), 167–169. doi:10.1207/s15328023top3203_8

APA Tutorial Unit 5: Appendixes and Tables and Figures—Oh My!

Sections

Present Research Findings in Your Paper

How Do I Say All of That?