Qualilative Psychology
So, I touched on having teaching assistant work this term, there's something that I'd like to get into in a little more depth. One of the placements is helping to teach qualilative psychology (something I'm eminently unqualified to teach but nevermind) and I just wanted to spend a moment considering its value next to quantitative psychology.

Basically this term encompasses a range of techniques to systematically explore the experiences of a given group (or of all people in relation to a given thing). Rather than striving for objectivity you accept that work involving people is necassarily subjective, reference any bias' that you might have on the subject you're investigating. Rather than quantifying some measure you collect some corpus of data. Perhaps interview transcripts, videos of meetings, letters etc. I came across one study that had used MSN chat logs, anything where people are communicating. Then search through it for things that identify how people build meaning. A quantiative psychologist will draw a conclusion along the lines of "For all people X" and a qualilative psychologist will draw one more similar to "For this particularly group of people in this context and at this time X". The former is obviously more useful, but it is also limiting in that it can be difficult for X to be too specific or to apply outside of very controlled conditions.

So, a few questions:

Is qualilative psychology valuable, given that the contexts it explores will always dissapear with time?
Is this science?
Is it the domain of psychology or anthropology?
Does qualilative psychology more readily prepare you for coming face to face with a studied phenomon?
What should the goals of psychology be and does this method help to further them?

Ach, to be honest you can make up your own questions. I'm just thinking out loud. I just know that some of you will find this interesting ;)