I am currently working on a PhD proposal and planning a comparative study of policies in different countries. My thinking is to compare the policies of around four countries using the case study as my method. How important is it that you are able to speak the language of the country you intend to do a case study on at PhD?

I am very worried that I will be rejected if for example, I propose to study Hungarian policies but cannot speak Hungarian.

Does anybody out there study a country in which they don't speak the language?

hey,

knowing the native language would help a lot in interpreting the policy documents.

still, u can always rely on a translator or the translated documents.
i reckon the university should allow u to proceed. they shouldn't say no on the basis of language alone.

i've got a friend working on comparative policies a while back, but don't u think four countries would be a bit taxing?

just my two cents :)

I think it would depend if you are doing a mainly quantitative study or not. If you are are mainly number crunching then I think you could get away with it. If it's qualitative, it will be a problem as translation costs are prohibitively high for most students. I know people who have got away with it by insisting their interviewees spoke English but then it's dubious how much you really get about what matters, and your available literature reduces substantially. I also think a four country case study approach is too many countries, so if you speak the languages of the others, why not just drop Hungary? Also although this is obvious, think through what research methods you could make a viable claim to use - obviously you couldn't do discourse analysis or ethnography if you don't have the language skills for example, but there are others.

I have a similar problem, iam writing a proposal and i have an issue about the methodology and the participants, for example my supposed participants are from deaf community or hard hearning how can i adjust the questionnaire? the reasearch would be take place in Holland and i do not know sign language

wow maria, if ur research is on the hearing impaired community, u're gonna need someone to help u with the sign language.

if the questionnaire can be understood by the hearing impaired participants ie they can read the questionnaire , i don't think there should be any problem.

however, conducting an interview should require sign language definitely.

sometimes, it's best to adapt the methodology to the constraint of research. unless, u're willing to do some extensive preliminary work in advance.