<p>Studying cultural preferences can provide valuable insights into individuals’ cultural identity, as it provides information on the degree to which they define themselves and their sense of belonging to a culture or ethnic group. Assuming that cultural identity has an explicit and implicit facet, this study aimed to investigate the quality of and relation between explicit and implicit measures of cultural preferences in different migration contexts. Middle Eastern young males aged between 14 and 22 years with different migration histories (75 refugees, 60 first or second-generation immigrants) and 60 young German native peers answered acculturation and mental health questionnaires (explicit measure) and responded to an adapted Implicit Association Test (IAT), which assesses implicit attitudes and preferences through reaction times to paired concepts. Despite being well-established in cross-cultural research, the explicit measure did not show sufficient measurement invariance when comparing the refugee and immigrant groups. For immigrant adolescents, the explicit and implicit measures showed a high degree of convergent validity. For refugee adolescents, a discrepancy was found between the implicit and explicit measures. These findings suggest qualitative differences in facets of cultural identity between refugee and immigrant youth and warn against a general and unspecific use of measurement methods across different migration contexts.</p>