The Society for Research in Adolescence conference in Chicago kicks off today. There is the usual flurry of people greeting old colleagues around the elevators and reservations desks, tripping over each others bags.

You hear a range of accents if you stand still anywhere for any length of time. SRA is good at keeping an international perspective. Journals in the adolescence world routinely cover cross-cultural issues and need no encouragement to consider that the US perspective may not be the only one. That's important and valued. And there is always a sense of reality and real world engagement. Everyone here has been an adolescent, and many have a house full of them back home. Most teach them, or at least what Jeffrey Arnett would call 'emerging adults'. I am travelling here with a practitioner, who works in front line services to very difficult young people, and who does no academic work. There are few academic conferences where this would work, but here there is a sense that it's possible to link the practice and academic worlds with relative ease. Most of the time anyway.

Cross cultural issues and practical application arose very clearly in the first major invited address here today, when Jane Brown from Chapel Hill talked about 'Growing up in a mediated world; The mass media and adolescents health'. Teen pregnancy rates and teen sexually transmitted diseases are both high in the US compared with many other countries. What are the messages about sex being conveyed in new forms of media and how do these messages affect behaviour? The Chapel Hill research project (