This presentation focuses on two of the National Centre for Longitudinal Data's surveys - Footprints in Time: The Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children (LSIC) and Building a New Life in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Humanitarian Migrants (BNLA). Although both LSIC and BNLA have relatively narrowly defined and different populations of interest, they have many similarities. Within both there is enormous cultural and language diversity which has implications for survey design, methodology and interpretation of results. This paper outlines some of the complexities involved with these study populations, the approaches adopted to overcome them and discusses some of the similarities and differences in the experiences and results.