It was a detour indeed considering I graduated in engineering. Nonetheless, sometime back I enrolled myself in the post-graduate psychology programme. I recently completed the course - M.A. (Psychology) from IGNOU and I thought I would put my project online to help others. It may serve as a general guidebook for anyone who's attempting to take on a new project and wish to conduct proper research in psychology. I should perhaps also mention that if you have decent knowledge of the two subjects - Research Design and Statistics, studying this project report and making use of it to design your own would be a cinch. This page would be of only general help and would let you know of the ways in which I collected data, combined it, analysed it and interpreted it. With this post, I intend to provide information related to the practical challenges that arise during research, these are essentially areas which a person may overlook due to lack of practical experience.
Some of the choices I made were more radical and were a result of unavailability of free resources. I should perhaps mention in bold that all the research papers I studied and reviewed were done using Sci-Hub, without its help and some of the other free tools like PsyToolkit (for study design and data collection) and PSPP (for analysis of collected data) this research would not have been possible. I have mentioned these at the onset because you may only be interested in finding out the tools that may be of help in conducting research.
The post below is an abridged version of the final project report (which also consisted of research project proposal). While all information like acknowledgement, title pages etc. have been retained along with various headings of the report as is, for better readability and understanding. I have removed the research proposal that was submitted to the university since changes made after submission / rejection were incorporated in the final project and hence the proposal was hardly of any value.