Several multiwave cross-national surveys have experienced drops in school participation for youth health and risk behavior (HRB) surveys in Western European countries. This article considers explanations for the challenge in recruiting schools for surveys in England, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States and the most important lessons learned during school recruitment for the third wave of the International Self-Report Delinquency Study in these four countries. Comparing school response rates for international academic surveys with those focused on HRB, schools have been increasingly less likely to participate in HRB surveys over the past two decades. However, considerable variation within and across surveys and countries suggests there are numerous influences on school recruitment, and there may be facilitators on which researchers could capitalize. We conclude that when planning future school-based HRB surveys, researchers should consider multiple strategies to engage schools from the outset, tailored to regional and national settings.

Young people with a migrant background are often overrepresented in crime statistics. This study used data from the third International Self-Report Delinquency (ISRD3) study to examine to what extent cultural alignment—cultural resemblance between host and heritage country—and structural influences—socioeconomic starting position and related disadvantage—mediated differences in offending between native students and students of four different migrant backgrounds—Western, Post-Communist, Asian, Middle Eastern—in five Western European countries. This study showed that all migrant groups, except for the Asian group, had significantly higher lifetime serious offending rates than native students. Opposed to the expectations, however, the Western group with the highest levels of cultural alignment—suggesting easier adaptation to the host country—also had the highest offending rates. In the mediation analysis, cultural alignment and structural disadvantage did not satisfactorily explain the relatively large differences in offending between Western and native students and further research would be needed to better understand these differences. In contrast, for the Middle Eastern group, structural disadvantage fully explained differences in offending with native students, also when accounting for cultural alignment; in other words, mechanisms related to structural disadvantage—for example, exposure to risks of delinquent development—for this group appeared to be more determining in explaining differences in offending with natives than their level of cultural alignment or background. For Asian and Post-Communist students, structural disadvantage mediated the largest part of the difference in offending with natives, but cultural alignment for these groups also explained part of this difference. This finding suggests that for these two groups mechanisms related to both cultural alignment—for example, acculturation processes, higher probability of parent–child conflict, and so on—and structural disadvantage are needed to understand differences in offending with native students.

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