7.7: Summary and APA Style Resources
- Page ID
- 240800
\( \newcommand{\vecs}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \)
\( \newcommand{\vecd}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash {#1}}} \)
\( \newcommand{\dsum}{\displaystyle\sum\limits} \)
\( \newcommand{\dint}{\displaystyle\int\limits} \)
\( \newcommand{\dlim}{\displaystyle\lim\limits} \)
\( \newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)
( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\)
\( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\) \( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\)
\( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\) \( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\)
\( \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}\)
\( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)
\( \newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\)
\( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)
\( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\)
\( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\)
\( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\)
\( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\)
\( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\)
\( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\)
\( \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}\)
\( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \( \newcommand{\AA}{\unicode[.8,0]{x212B}}\)
\( \newcommand{\vectorA}[1]{\vec{#1}} % arrow\)
\( \newcommand{\vectorAt}[1]{\vec{\text{#1}}} % arrow\)
\( \newcommand{\vectorB}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \)
\( \newcommand{\vectorC}[1]{\textbf{#1}} \)
\( \newcommand{\vectorD}[1]{\overrightarrow{#1}} \)
\( \newcommand{\vectorDt}[1]{\overrightarrow{\text{#1}}} \)
\( \newcommand{\vectE}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash{\mathbf {#1}}}} \)
\( \newcommand{\vecs}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \)
\( \newcommand{\vecd}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash {#1}}} \)
\(\newcommand{\avec}{\mathbf a}\) \(\newcommand{\bvec}{\mathbf b}\) \(\newcommand{\cvec}{\mathbf c}\) \(\newcommand{\dvec}{\mathbf d}\) \(\newcommand{\dtil}{\widetilde{\mathbf d}}\) \(\newcommand{\evec}{\mathbf e}\) \(\newcommand{\fvec}{\mathbf f}\) \(\newcommand{\nvec}{\mathbf n}\) \(\newcommand{\pvec}{\mathbf p}\) \(\newcommand{\qvec}{\mathbf q}\) \(\newcommand{\svec}{\mathbf s}\) \(\newcommand{\tvec}{\mathbf t}\) \(\newcommand{\uvec}{\mathbf u}\) \(\newcommand{\vvec}{\mathbf v}\) \(\newcommand{\wvec}{\mathbf w}\) \(\newcommand{\xvec}{\mathbf x}\) \(\newcommand{\yvec}{\mathbf y}\) \(\newcommand{\zvec}{\mathbf z}\) \(\newcommand{\rvec}{\mathbf r}\) \(\newcommand{\mvec}{\mathbf m}\) \(\newcommand{\zerovec}{\mathbf 0}\) \(\newcommand{\onevec}{\mathbf 1}\) \(\newcommand{\real}{\mathbb R}\) \(\newcommand{\twovec}[2]{\left[\begin{array}{r}#1 \\ #2 \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\ctwovec}[2]{\left[\begin{array}{c}#1 \\ #2 \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\threevec}[3]{\left[\begin{array}{r}#1 \\ #2 \\ #3 \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\cthreevec}[3]{\left[\begin{array}{c}#1 \\ #2 \\ #3 \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\fourvec}[4]{\left[\begin{array}{r}#1 \\ #2 \\ #3 \\ #4 \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\cfourvec}[4]{\left[\begin{array}{c}#1 \\ #2 \\ #3 \\ #4 \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\fivevec}[5]{\left[\begin{array}{r}#1 \\ #2 \\ #3 \\ #4 \\ #5 \\ \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\cfivevec}[5]{\left[\begin{array}{c}#1 \\ #2 \\ #3 \\ #4 \\ #5 \\ \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\mattwo}[4]{\left[\begin{array}{rr}#1 \amp #2 \\ #3 \amp #4 \\ \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\laspan}[1]{\text{Span}\{#1\}}\) \(\newcommand{\bcal}{\cal B}\) \(\newcommand{\ccal}{\cal C}\) \(\newcommand{\scal}{\cal S}\) \(\newcommand{\wcal}{\cal W}\) \(\newcommand{\ecal}{\cal E}\) \(\newcommand{\coords}[2]{\left\{#1\right\}_{#2}}\) \(\newcommand{\gray}[1]{\color{gray}{#1}}\) \(\newcommand{\lgray}[1]{\color{lightgray}{#1}}\) \(\newcommand{\rank}{\operatorname{rank}}\) \(\newcommand{\row}{\text{Row}}\) \(\newcommand{\col}{\text{Col}}\) \(\renewcommand{\row}{\text{Row}}\) \(\newcommand{\nul}{\text{Nul}}\) \(\newcommand{\var}{\text{Var}}\) \(\newcommand{\corr}{\text{corr}}\) \(\newcommand{\len}[1]{\left|#1\right|}\) \(\newcommand{\bbar}{\overline{\bvec}}\) \(\newcommand{\bhat}{\widehat{\bvec}}\) \(\newcommand{\bperp}{\bvec^\perp}\) \(\newcommand{\xhat}{\widehat{\xvec}}\) \(\newcommand{\vhat}{\widehat{\vvec}}\) \(\newcommand{\uhat}{\widehat{\uvec}}\) \(\newcommand{\what}{\widehat{\wvec}}\) \(\newcommand{\Sighat}{\widehat{\Sigma}}\) \(\newcommand{\lt}{<}\) \(\newcommand{\gt}{>}\) \(\newcommand{\amp}{&}\) \(\definecolor{fillinmathshade}{gray}{0.9}\)This summary page will include more than key takeaways and exercises. This is also where you'll find additional resources on APA Style!
Key Takeaways
- Many fields in the social sciences and medicine utilize APA Style, a formatting and writing style to encourage technical writing that follows a typical structure.
- APA Style has very specific requirements for formatting, but also is a guide for writing style.
- There are specific formats for citing sources in the text, and for formatting the references of these sources at the and of the manuscript. There are also specific formatting requirements for each section of a research report.
- Research proposals are designed to present researchers' ideas on how they would design and analyze their next research study. While the formatting is similar to a typical APA Style research report, the content focuses on justifying the research study rather than describing a study that the researcher has already completed.
Resources
Dr. MO encourages you to purchase the APA Style manual if you are a psychology or sociology major. However, your school’s library has the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th ed. Note that it is typically considered a reference (like a dictionary or encyclopedia), so you probably can’t take it out of the library. Your library probably has a webpage devoted to APA Style, as well. Your library probably also has a Library Guide or additional resources for APA Style. The APA has developed a website (https://apastyle.apa.org/) to help you find how to format in APA Style (APA, 2025a). This website is a good resource for formatting, but you need the actual book to learn about the high-level style of writing and communication (discussed in the Introduction to APA Style section of this textbook). When using these, make sure to use the resources for the Professional type of paper, not the Student version (unless your instructor prefers the Student version). The APA also provides a variety of writing guides; the box below shows some of the newer guides and introductions. As mentioned in the section on How to Read a Research Article, there is also a Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS) webpage (APA, 2025b). Specific guides are listed in the box below. For more information on qualitative research, review The Qualitative Approach section in the chapter on Analyzing.
Primary Guide: Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.) (2020); more information can be found at https://apastyle.apa.org/
These writing guides developed by the APA provide guidelines for specific types of research and topics:
- JARS-Quant (2018) standards (includes additional guides for many different types of designs and methodologies): https://apastyle.apa.org/jars/quantitative
- JARS-Qual (2018) standards: https://apastyle.apa.org/jars/qualitative
- JARS-Mixed (2018) standards: https://apastyle.apa.org/jars/mixed-methods
- Three key things you should know about APA’s new inclusive language guidelines (Akbar, 2022) APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/inclus...age-guidelines (which is supposed to link to this document: Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion: Inclusive Language Guidelines (APA, 2023): https://pages.apa.org/edi-guidelines/)
- JARS- Race, Ethnicity, and Culture (2023) (includes video towards the bottom of the page): https://apastyle.apa.org/jars/race-ethnicity-culture
- Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity Research Manuscript Writing Guide (Veldhuis et al., 2024): https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2024-79040-001.pdf
Another great resource for formatting is Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab (website address: http://owl.english.purdue.edu) has an immense collection of webpages dedicated to APA Style, including a whole set of pages on references. There’s a PDF of a sample Professional Style paper with explanations of formatting. There's also a sample paper for students, but we are using the Professional Style version.
This APA Checklist is a PDF developed by Dr. MO to go through before you turn in any project that is supposed to be formatted in APA Style.
Many people learn best by watching (and re-watching) videos, so here’s a good video in Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\) showing how to format a Word document into an APA Style paper. Although sometimes the features are in different places in a Google doc or on a Mac, all word processing software will allow you to make these modifications.
DO NOT USE THE APA STYLE TEMPLATE PROVIDED BY WORD. I know that this seems like an easy way to format you paper, but the template is really difficult to modify. For example, if you don’t need, say, an abstract or a reference page for your paper, it is nearly impossible to delete those from your paper when created from the template without messing up the formatting for the rest of your paper.
Here is a sample paper as a Word document (.docx). Save this to your own drive or computer so that you can save and modify it. This is an example paper to show APA Style formatting, and the basic information in a descriptive statistics paper. Careful reading shows that the topic and numbers change throughout the paper because it is a combination of several different students’ papers. This is just a guide; do NOT copy the words, just the format.
What's Next
If you can believe it, you are now done learning the foundational concepts of research methods and you should have more familiarity in reading and writing research reports. The next unit focuses on different kinds of research designs.
- Practice: Using a research article, find all of the standard APA Style sections detailed in this chapter
- Practice: Using a research article, note how that article's published formatting differs from APA Style formatting for a standard research report.
- Practice: Correctly cite a research article by using the authors' names in the sentence, then write another sentence with a citation of a second research article at the end of the sentence.
- Practice: Correctly format a reference for each of the articles for each of the citations that you just completed.
- Practice: Draft a paper in APA Style, then use the APA Checklist to check-off what you did correctly and what you missed.
- Discussion: Read Russel et al. (2022), then see if you can:
- Summarize the three sections of the introduction section in 3-5 sentences for each section for a classmate who has not read the article,
- Summarize the method section in 4-8 sentences for a classmate who has not read the article,
- Summarize the results section (called Findings) in 3-5 sentences for a classmate who has not read the article, then
- Describe what you learned from this article.
- Discussion: Work with your classmates to find what resources your library or professor has provided related to APA Style.
References
Akbar, M. (2022). Three key things you should know about APA’s new inclusive language guidelines. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/inclus...age-guidelines