Copyright 2010, University of Washington APApaper.pdf
• Describe all results that are directly related to your research questions or hypotheses. Start with hypotheses
you were able to support with significant statistics before reporting nonsignificant trends. Then describe any
additional results that are more indirectly relevant to your questions.
• If you present many results (i.e., many variables or variables with many levels), write a brief summary, then
discuss each variable in separate subsections.
• Report main effects before reporting contrasts or interactions. Briefly mention problems such as reasons for
missing data, but save discussion of the problems for the discussion section.
• Use tables and figures to summarize data. Include descriptive statistics (such as means and standard
deviations or standard errors), and give significance levels of any inferential statistics. The goal is to make
your results section both succinct and quantitatively informative (see our handout, "APA Table Guidelines").
• For each test used, provide degrees of freedom, obtained value of the test, and the probability of the result
occurring by chance (p-value). Here are examples of the results of a t-test and an F-test, respectively: t(23) =
101.20, p < .001; F(1, 3489) = 7.94, p < .001 (see also our handout on reporting statistical results in APA
format).
Discussion
In this section, interpret your results by relating them to your hypotheses. Use words to explain the quantitative
information from the results section.
Requirements
Discuss the results in relation to each hypothesis. This is the most important part of the Discussion section.
Discuss possible explanations for your results. This part should follow from the predictions you made
earlier based on possible outcomes of the study. Do the results agree or disagree with the ideas that you
introduced in the Introduction? How do the results relate to previous literature or current theory? Identify and
discuss limitations in the experimental design that may reduce the strength of your results. Generalize your
results. This is where you tell the reader the extent to which your study is externally valid. Discuss strengths
and weaknesses of applying your results to, for example, another population, species, age, or sex.
Identify followup experiments. Introduce new ideas that your results suggest, and propose ways to test them.
How to Proceed
• Explain whether your results support the hypotheses.
• Discuss how the results relate to the research question in general.
The results are consistent with the Yerkes-Dodson law.
These results show the advantage of using a secondary reaction time paradigm for assessing cognitive load during reading.
The finding that the infant monkeys increased their food intake in the low-calorie condition and reduced food intake in the high-
calorie condition is consistent with the hypothesis that pigtailed macaques adjust their food intake to maintain a constant level of
caloric intake. Although the difference between the two conditions decreased across time, however, the infants consumed more
calories in the high-calorie condition than the low-calorie condition.
• If you had a directional hypothesis and your results didn't turn out as expected, discuss possible explanations
as to why, including unanticipated shortcomings in the design, problems such as equipment failure, or even