Reader Reviews

 This is the most comprehensive book on APA style I’ve ever seen. It includes everything, and I mean everything and then some. From showing what the final product should look like to showing the MS-Word tricks needed for formatting, Hatcher’s book has it all. Nobody with this book will have to submit a paper or poster or presentation and wonder if they have met APA’s style criteria.

Dr. Jerry K. Palmer
Psychology Department
Eastern Kentucky University

 

APA Style for Papers, Presentations, and Statistical Results is an ideal resource for social and behavioral science students, faculty, and researchers. In the book, Hatcher takes a unique approach of integrating requisite topics for producing research papers and presentations: research concepts, statistics concepts, APA guidelines, and practical information on creating poster presentations, PowerPoint presentations, and APA-style papers. The book is rich with examples that illustrate effective application of APA guidelines and reporting standards.

The book is particularly helpful in its offerings of practical information, including chapter checklists that guide application of the given chapter’s principles and step-by-step instructions for using Microsoft Word to prepare and format papers/presentations. In addition, the chapters that cover common statistical procedures provide the rationale for using the procedure, statistical assumptions pertaining to the procedure, information about elements to include when reporting the results of the procedure, and a sample report of the procedure’s results.

Dr. Pamela Deering
Director of eLearning & EdTech Services
Allegany College of Maryland

 

I have been a professor for nearly 30 years anxiously awaiting the publication of Dr. Hatcher's latest text, APA Style for Papers, Presentations, and Statistical Results: The Complete Guide. For any undergraduate or graduate student, this is an excellent step-by-step book on how to correctly write a research paper utilizing the APA writing manual. Since I often take undergraduate students to conferences, I found the chapters on using PowerPoint and Presenting at Poster Sessions to be quite useful.

Dr. Chas Koermer

 

This book will be an immediate replacement for the two books that I currently use for my Laboratory in Psychology class. It is well-written and organized. Dr. Hatcher uses language that will appeal to undergraduate students. It combines topics across methods, writing, formatting, and statistics so that students have a user-friendly single-source guide that can help them to improve their research.

There were several components of the book that I especially appreciated—I give three examples below. First, the presentation about effect sizes is excellent. I've had to create my own table about interpreting effect sizes and have now switched over to using a copy of Larry Hatcher's table.

A second example is the inclusion of how to perform some fairly basic word processing functions in Microsoft Word. I teach my students a few of these tips; it's nice to have these and many more I listed within the text.

Finally, I've spent countless hours explaining what content goes in each section. Larry Hatcher's guide for this is excellent.

Dr. Timothy Franz
Professor
Department of Psychology
St. John Fisher College

 

APA Style for Papers, Presentations, and Statistical Results clearly illustrates key aspects of APA format for papers, posters, and presentations. The many examples and checklists make it easy to follow APA format and the tips for using MS Office products will save students and researchers hours.

In particular, I liked the examples coupled with the checklists. Students routinely want examples of how to do something but then fail to extract the general guidelines or apply them to their own work. Presenting both the examples and the checklist helps students understand why the examples look the way they do and how they might address those guidelines when their projects differ from the examples. I wish I had a copy when I was preparing my Research Methods course. It would have saved me considerable time creating examples of APA style issues.

I also appreciated the chapter on creating posters…it helps researchers understand how posters differ from manuscripts. This is surprisingly hard for many students to understand, and even harder for them to follow as they create their posters.

Matthew Hayes, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
Winthrop University

 

This is a fabulous resource book for anyone who has to report the results of data analysis. Even for seasoned data analysts, communicating and reporting results is a difficult, yet vitally important, skill that is rarely taught in statistics classes.

The book is filled with great advice on how to conduct and report data analysis. There is a great balance between giving the big picture of data analysis and how to approach communicating results and digging deeply into the details of what to include in any given report. For example, a major strength is that there are chapters not just on writing up results sections for papers, but also for posters and presentations.

The book includes much more than it promises in the title. It is not simply a book on formatting in APA Style, but a book on how to do good data analysis and how to write up those results with transparency and clarity.

One thing I really like is the handling of advice on controversial issues in data analysis, like analyzing likert data and p-values. The Big-Three Results was an excellent chapter that gave both the overview and the detail on what needs to be reported in order to communicate results well. The emphasis on transparency in reporting is something science sorely needs.

The level of detail in each chapter is exactly the kind of help that new data analysts are often looking for. For example, the chapter on Presenting Results in Tables gives very exhaustive, on-point explanations of what should go into each column, exactly how to present a p-value, and what should and should not be capitalized. Having guidance on these details will save students hours of frustration.

And as always in Dr. Hatcher’s books, the writing is clear, accessible, and well-organized. It’s impossible to avoid jargon in statistical books, but Dr. Hatcher takes the time to break down complicated topics and vocabulary so that they’re understandable.

Karen Grace-Martin
The Analysis Factor

 

As usual, Dr Hatcher has written another excellent statistics book for students. I recommend this book to any graduate student who would like to learn how to write up their research results using APA methods.

Dr Hatcher gives very broad guided examples of how to write a paper using APA which helps with making it relevant for students. There are very helpful review sections on key statistical methods that are important for grad students and can serve as a very useful resource to have on any shelf for post grads. There are also examples of how to create poster presentations which are a big part of being a grad student. Overall, this is the go-to book for all of your grad research needs packed in one!

Lynnette
PhD candidate (Medicine)
University of Queensland
Australia

 

I found the walk-throughs to be an asset. The sample paper and other displays are easy-to-follow guides.

This is an excellent resource, especially for those quantitative studies! And it would be useful for qualitative studies regarding reporting descriptive info, too.

Dr. William P. (Bill) Childs
Professor of Education
Educational Professions Department
Frostburg State University