Business Law Essay assignment

Sample APA Paper for Students Interested in Learning APA Style 6th Edition

Jeffrey H. Kahn

Illinois State University

Abstract

The abstract should be a single paragraph in block format (without paragraph indentation), and the appropriate length depends on the journal to which you are submitting, but they are typically between 150 and 200 words. (Students should consult their instructor for the recommended length of the abstract.) Section 2.04 of the APA manual (American Psychological Association [APA], 2010) has additional information about the abstract. The abstract is important because many journal readers first read the abstract to determine if the entire article is worth reading. The abstract should describe all four parts of an empirical paper (i.e., Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion). Consider writing one or two sentences summarizing each part of a paper, and you’ll have a nice abstract.

Sample APA Paper for Students Interested in Learning APA Style

Before getting started you will notice some things about this paper. First, everything is double-spaced. Second, margins are 1-inch wide on all sides. Third, there are several headings used throughout to separate different parts of the paper; some of the headings are in bold. Fourth, there is exactly one space after each punctuation mark (except for periods at the end of a sentence, after which there are two spaces). Fifth, the upper left of each page has a running head in all capital letters, and the upper right has the page number. Try to pay attention to all of these details as you look through this paper.

Now that those details are out of the way, you should know that this first part of the paper is called the “Introduction” section, yet it does not have a heading that actually says

“Introduction.” Instead, the title of the paper is typed at the top of the first page (be sure to center the title, but do not put it in bold). In this section you would often start with a topic paragraph that introduces the problem under study. The importance of the topic should be pretty clear from the first paragraph or two of the Introduction. Section 2.05 of the APA manual (APA, 2010) will help give you some ideas about how to write this.

The bulk of the Introduction section is background literature on the topic. Here a literature review is often very helpful to provide a theoretical or empirical basis for the research. Try to provide the reader with enough information on the topic to be able to conclude that the research is important and that the hypotheses are reasonable. Any prior work on the topic would be useful to include here, although prior work that is most directly related to the hypotheses would be of greatest value.

Remember to cite your sources often in the Introduction and throughout the manuscript. Articles and books are cited the same way in the text, yet they appear different on the References page. For example, an article by Cronbach and Meehl (1955) and a book by Bandura (1986) are written with the authors’ names and the year of the publication in parentheses. However, if you look on the References page they look a little different. Remember that APA style does not use footnotes or anything like that for citations. Two other things about citations are important. When a citation is written inside parentheses (e.g., Cronbach & Meehl, 1959), an ampersand is used between authors’ names instead of the word “and.” Second, when citing an author’s work using quotations, be sure to include a page number. For example, Rogers (1961) once wrote that two important elements of a helping relationship are “genuineness and transparency” (p. 37). Notice that the page number is included here. Unless a direct quote is taken from a source, the page number is not included.

The last section of the Introduction states the purpose of the research. The purpose can usually be summarized in a few sentences. Hypotheses are also included here at the end of this section. State your hypotheses as predictions (e.g., “I predicted that...”), and try to avoid using passive tense (e.g., “It was predicted that...”). You will notice that hypotheses are written in past tense because you are describing a study you have finished.

References

American Psychological Association. (2010). Publication manual of the American Psychological

Association (6th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.

Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Cronbach, L. J., & Meehl, P. E. (1955). Construct validity in psychological tests. Psychological

Bulletin, 52, 281-302. doi:10.1037/h0040957

Crowne, C. P., & Marlowe, D. (1960). A new scale of social desirability independent of psychopathology. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 24, 349-354. doi:10.1037/h0047358

Rogers, C. R. (1961). On becoming a person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. e 2

Convergent and Discriminant Validity of Depression Scale