Thanks for the advice guys!

I shot the rest of the days in both RAW and JPEG using just my 50mm lens and I really saw the difference when I was processing the photos. I am definitely going to start shooting in RAW from now on. I love it. I ended up having some other problems like cropping issues and in some cases, really extreme changes in lighting that could not be fixed, but overall, I'm much happier with how my photos came out this year.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/103393701@N02/
Here's my Flickr where I uploaded all of my photos. I'll post some of my favorites here though.
I'm pretty confident that this was the issue. The camera was choosing the focus on its own, so for poses where the person had something pointing towards me, that was what was getting the majority of the focus. I found a way to work around it by shifting the camera to set it focus on one thing before moving it to get the right framing.
But as for the shutter speed, I was tight that 1/30th was the lowest I could go to avoid the camera shake. But to be safe, I ended up shooting mostly between 1/80th and 1/125th. I also had my ISO set to auto, although in some cases it would go as high as 3200, so there was some sacrifices I had to make.