"I'm a beginner with 0 research experience, what does research actually entail?" As someone who has been a research intern at Cambridge, LSE, and Ashoka, and an independent researcher at Lady Shri Ram College, I've written a brief guide to the research process:

Broadly, research has 6 steps which are elaborated below:

1. Finding Research Gaps, Reviewing Literature, and Deciding a Research Question:

You can decide a research question by finding research gaps i.e. understudied topics/populations/methods. I developed my research interests by noting topics from my textbooks that interested me and then reviewing literature (research papers) related to those topics. A literature review entails searching for literature on the topic using databases such as google scholar, thoroughly reviewing it, and noting the sample, method and findings to inform your research design.

2. Deciding Research Design and Generating Hypothesis:

Informed by the literature review, you develop a research design and generate hypotheses.

3. Collecting Data:

In psychology, data is collected through experiments, surveys, interviews, focus group discussions, etc.

4. Analyzing Data:

Quantitative data is analyzed through statistical techniques such as regression, t tests, ANOVA, structural equation modelling, etc. Qualitative data is analyzed through techniques such as thematic analysis (TA), interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA), etc.

5. Drawing Conclusions and Writing Findings:

You draw conclusions based on the data analysis and write up your findings for presentations at conferences and/or publications in journals.

One INDISPENSABLE advice for writing papers is to emulate your literature review papers to ensure that your write-up is of high quality. After I write my manuscripts, I always compare them with the papers I used for literature review and make changes accordingly.

6. Presenting/Publishing Findings:

Researchers communicate their findings through publication in scientific journals or presentations at conferences:

Journals by publication houses such as American Psychological Association, Sage, Wiley, an Taylor and Francis are prestigious and have a high impact factor. You can find them online by searching for your field of study/topic plus publication house plus journal.

For example, “social psychology Sage journal”, “body image Wiley journal”. Academic Twitter is the best source for looking for conferences to present at.

All this may sound intimidating at first, but the more you engage in research, and practice research, the easier it gets!

Moreover, avoid self-rejection. As James Clear said, “we often avoid taking action because we think we need to learn more. But the best way to learn is by taking action!”.