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The American Psychological Association (APA) has various rules when it comes to constructing tables in their publication manual. In below is a summary of the relevant content in chapters 5.07 till 5.19 in the 6th edition (American Psychological Association, 2010, pp. 128–160).
Font and spacing
The preferred font in APA style is Times new roman, size 12 with double spacing.
The caption
The APA requires a numbering of all the tables (and also figures) used. For a table the caption goes above it, and is ‘Table’ followed by an Arabic number (i.e. 1, 2, 3, etc. and not Roman like i, ii, etc.). No prefixes or suffixes in the numbering (e.g. no 1a, 1b, 2.1,), except for the appendix where you can use A1, A2, B1, B2, etc. where B2 is the 2nd table in appendix B. On a new line below Table X the title of the table should be shown in italic.
Refer in the text to the table by it’s number. This means to use for example ‘see Table X’ somewhere in the text, and not ‘see table below’, or ‘see table on page y’.
Column titles
Each column (including the first one) should have a clear and concise title. This should be singular , except for groups (e.g. Children) and start with a capital letter. So ‘relative frequencies’ is double wrong since it doesn’t start with a capital letter and is plural, it should be Relative frequency.
Another comment is that instead of writing ‘percent’ as a table column the symbol % can be used to save space.
Borders
The use of borders (called rules in APA) should be limited. APA does not allow any vertical borders. It does allow for a horizontal border above and below the table, as well as below the column titles. Also column spanners can have a horizontal border below it, and table spanners above them. In 'Presenting Your Findings; A practical guide for creating tables' it is also mentioned that a horizontal border above a total row is permissible (Nicol & Pexman, 2011, pg. 9).
Numbers
If the total cannot exceed 1, then the zero before the decimal separator should not be shown. This would mean that for the relative frequency it should not be shown for example as 0.4 but as .4.
If a cell is empty because the data could not be obtained or cannot be reported, insert a dash (–). This dash then needs to be explained in a general note below the table. For general notes below a table use in italic Note. and then write the note.
As an example Table 23 shows how Table 10 would look in APA style.