26  Reporting Results in APA Format

The American Psychological Association publishes the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, which gives detailed guidelines on formatting standards for scholarly writing in psychology. While most of you will likely never write a paper for an APA journal, or have to format your bibliographic references in APA style, the APA manual does define a very useful format for the reporting of statistical results. This format is designed to ensure that whenever a statistical result is reported—a confidence interval, a regression slope, a t test—there is enough detail for the reader to clearly understand the test or method used, the number of observations, any measures of uncertainty, and so on.

For hypothesis tests, the APA standards require articles to include “the minimally sufficient set of statistics (e.g. dfs, mean square effect, MS error) needed to construct the tests”, as well as effect-size estimates and confidence intervals, when possible. Here we’ll give some examples of how to do this in regression.

For consistency, we’ll use Example 7.3 throughout. Notice we must be careful and precise in our interpretation of coefficients, since the model has an interaction term.