Well, I've finished my first foray into qualitative research. Here are my thoughts:
1) It is VERY time consuming.
2) It take A LOT more mental effort that quantitative (statistical) analysis of pre-packaged data.
3) It is more fun.
4) It is more rewarding because you actually get to be creative.

We are learning a technique called "grounded theory", in which you build theory from the bottom (data) up instead of imposing a theory on already collected data. Our task this week was to do interviews and then "open code" the interviews, looking for emerging concepts. It was HARD. I really enjoyed doing the interviews. I interviewed two dads for my project, as my goal is to explore some issues of fatherhood. Namely, I was looking to see how men understand their role as father, their relationship to their child, and especially how their wife factors in to their thoughts and feelings on being a father. There is a suggestion in the literature that men's connections to their children are filtered through their connections to the biological mother of their children. What I found was that the men, in fact, discussed their wives and their relationship quite a bit when responding to questions about being a father. Now, considering that I really had NO idea what I was doing when I was "coding", I don't know how well the assignment actually went. I'm really looking forward to getting feedback from the professor because I feel like grounded theory is an amazing tool and one that I could really get into using.

Now that I've experienced the freedom and creativity of qualitative design, I'm loathing my largely quantitative thesis - but have to muster up some passion to actually work on it. More on that later, hopefully. For now...It's off to other things.