The research sought to find out how international students came to terms with cultural differences and positioned themselves in a complex environment such as a boarding school. This article considers how a researcher's insider position can enrich the understanding in a multicultural school setting while identifying the hidden dilemmas. The adoption of multiple roles was one of the strategies used to cope with these dilemmas and the article shows how these can be useful in revealing emergent participant meanings and perceptions in ethnographic research. (Contains 1 note.)