How to Report Statistical Results in APA-7 Format
The 7th edition of the APA Publication Manual sets out precise rules for reporting statistics, and thesis committees notice when they are broken. The good news: once you know the pattern, every test follows the same logic. A complete APA results statement always contains four ingredients — the test statistic, its degrees of freedom, the exact p-value, and an effect size.
The core formatting rules
- Italicize statistical symbols from the Latin alphabet: t, F, p, r, d, M, SD, N, U, z. Greek letters such as χ², η², and β are not italicized.
- Report exact p-values to two or three decimal places (p = .024), not just "p < .05". The only exception is very small values, which are written as p < .001.
- Drop the leading zero for statistics that cannot exceed 1, such as p-values, correlations, and Cramér's V — write .46, not 0.46.
- Include an effect size whenever possible: Cohen's d for t-tests, partial η² for ANOVA, Cramér's V for chi-square, and R² for regression. APA-7 treats effect sizes as essential, not optional.
- Use two decimal places for most statistics (means, standard deviations, t-, F-, and z-values), and put degrees of freedom in parentheses immediately after the symbol: t(58) = 2.31.
Statistics are only half the sentence
A common mistake is dumping numbers on the page without interpretation. APA style expects you to state the finding in plain language first, then support it with statistics: "Students in the intervention group scored significantly higher than controls, t(58) = 2.31, p = .024, d = 0.60." The reader should understand the result even if they skip the numbers. That is why this formatter asks for your group and variable names — the sentence it produces reads as a finding, not a formula.
Where these sentences go
Formatted statements like the ones generated above belong in the Results chapter of your thesis or dissertation, usually one paragraph per hypothesis: restate the hypothesis, name the test, report the statistics, and state whether the hypothesis was supported. Descriptive statistics typically come first, followed by assumption checks and then the inferential tests. For a full walkthrough of structuring that chapter — including what belongs in text versus tables — see our guide on how to write the results section of your thesis.
And remember: perfectly formatted results can still be the wrong results. If you are unsure whether you ran the right test in the first place, our statisticians can check your analysis before you submit.