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There are additional challenges to recruiting and retaining study participants for longitudinal research when the study population is immigrants. Immigrants may not be accustomed to or trust mechanisms that are in place for the protection of human subjects. Immigrants may also have difficulty trusting researchers from cultures other than their own. In addition, immigrants move often in their early resettlement and attrition is a likely problem unless mechanisms are in place to minimize losing contact. This paper will describe challenges and solutions to recruiting and retaining Arab Muslim women and their children for a five-year study that investigates maternal and child stress and adolescent adjustment. The study includes three data collection appointments at 18-month intervals to capture maternal and child stress and its impact upon developmental transitions from early to middle and late adolescence. Selected issues pertaining to increased mistrust since the September 11 terrorist attacks and the most recent Gulf war, as well as husbands' social control over their wives and children in traditional Muslim cultures will be illustrated. Problems pertaining to Muslim women's attempts to circumvent their husbands' authority will also be discussed. Solutions, such as using community-based Muslims to recruit and collect data and instituting a data base to track women's preferred methods for contact for continued study participation, will be presented. Challenges related to the solution of using community-based Muslims to recruit and collect data will also be discussed. Other symposium presenters will respond by discussing how these challenges and solutions differed in their research studies with Mexican and Russian immigrants.