47-375 803 RESEARCH III: Laboratory
Sample Results Section
Remember that
everything that appears in the results section should be foreshadowed in the
Introduction and Methods sections. The
comparisons you make should be clear from your hypotheses. Any scores you use should be clear from your
descriptions of materials or procedure.
Any demographic data you choose to explore (or included in your
hypotheses) should be described under Participants. You must use APA style.
Start with descriptives. Move to comparisons. Continue with any exploratory analyses. Report statistics to two decimal places only. Report the direction of difference (what is greater or less than what). Illustrate what is clarified by illustration if it is a significant finding. Summarize in a table if it is helpful. The example below is totally fabricated. The numbers are not real, and do not add up. The single spacing is not APA style. Consult your text book for additional examples.
Note especially that the graph inserted (Figure 1) has nothing to do with anything. I couldn't get an appropriate graph to work, and so just used this because it does a good job of communicating information AND it has everything labeled.
Sample
ANOVA: 2x2 with one between and one
within
Descriptive statistics are
summarized in Table 1. These data were
examined using a 2x2 ANOVA with one between (type of background music) and one
within factor (affective tone of words).
The main effect for music was significant (F (1, 38) = 4.27; p < .05) with participants in the
happy music condition recalling more words than those for whom sad music was
played in the background. The effect
for word type within subject was not significant (F (1, 38) = 1.07;
n.s.)
Table 1. Words (M (SD)) recalled by background music and type of word (N
= 40)
Type of Music
Sad Happy
(n=20) (n=20)
Sad Words 27.65
(9.89) 32.25 (10.88)
A significant interaction effect emerged for the type of background music and affective tone of the target words (F (1, 38) = 9.85; p < .01). Participants, on average, recalled more words when the emotional valence of the background music matched the emotional valence of the words as illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Mean (SE) number of additional happy
compared with sad words (within subjects) recalled under two types of
background music (between subjects).
In an exploratory analysis, the contribution of gender of the participant and degree of musical training were examined. Females tended to recall more words than males overall (t (18) = 2.20 p < .10); however, there were no effects of gender when all a 2x2x2 ANOVA tested for gender, type of music, and type of word. When the number of years of musical training was entered as a covariate, the significance of the main findings did not change.
Reminders
·
Label all figures and tables appropriately.
·
Put any necessary data reduction information (e.g., how you
created composite variables using means or sums—reducing from 80 individual
variables to 2 composites) and any reliability information (for those of you coding
responses for a type of content like originality, fluency, or frequency) in
Methods where you are discussing the instruments you use.
·
Do put statistical sentences and interpretations in the
results.
·
Do not try to convey the results of multivariate tests that
you do not understand at a level beyond which you should be expected (e.g.,
covariate analyses). Keep that part of
the report simple.
·
When you have a within subject variable, the thing you are
interested in is the mean of the differences (e.g., average of all the happy
scores minus all the sad computed for each participant) and not the average of the happy scores
compared to the average of the sad.
Make sure to get that concept conveyed in any tables or figures (as in
sample, Figure 1).