I have a confession to make. I am a QUANT.By a QUANT, I mean that I am good at quantitative methods and, because I’m good at them, I tend to gravitate to them. I simply prefer doing quantitative studies. I conduct mostly mixed methods studies, but I tend to leave the qualitative work to the experts. I don’t think I would say I’m post-positivist and like to say I’m pragmatist (I am constantly reflecting on whether this is true for me), but it is clear to me that I lean more towards quantitative methods.I confess to this because being a QUANT used to make me feel guilty. I have always understood and respected the power of qualitative work, but because I am much better at quantitative work I have never really worked at improving my skills in qualitative work. I would go so far to say that I am a very poor qualitative evaluator. It’s a lot easier to hire a qualitative expert than try to do it myself.I am not sure being a QUANT is entirely my fault. My graduate school requires a full year of statistics our first year (intermediate stats, ANOVA, regression, and categorical data analysis) and has offered numerous extra statistics courses beyond that which I ate up and even TA’d for (e.g., multivariate statistics, factor analysis, SEM, MLM, IRT). On the other hand, they only have one qualitative class (which has only been offered three times during my time at the school and I never had the opportunity to take it) and a new mixed methods class (which I did take, but the class did not teach qualitative methods).Despite being a QUANT, I am going to try to improve my qualitative skills while I am still in graduate school. My dissertation is going to be a sequential explanatory mixed methods design, with a whopping forty interviews at the second stage. I am leading a project that is heavily qualitative and has required me to learn better coding strategies and how to calculate interrater reliability. I’m doing more of the qualitative work in my evaluations rather than leaving it to the experts.It’s pained me to be so unknowledgeable about a topic that I should know more about, which is why I am committing to read Michael Quinn Patton’s book on Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods (4^th Ed) while my fellow students take the qualitative class in school. I’m two chapters in and we’re having great discussions on it. Stay tuned for a post in a month or two for my reflections on this endeavor.