Abstract
The Japan Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology decided to place school counselors in every public junior high school starting in 2001. It is important to investigate how the counselors could fit into the school community, in order to be able to advise school counselors on how to have an effective role. The present paper focuses on open school counseling rooms, one of the ways that school counselors support schools. On the basis of fieldwork conducted at one junior high school, the present paper examines the structure and meaning of school counseling rooms/open rooms for students. Data were gathered from questionnaires (Study 1), observations (Study 2), and interviews (Study 3) in order to investigate the functional structure of counseling rooms from the students' perspective. The results suggest that, for the students, counseling rooms function as an open space separate from the school, and a private space within the school. Based on hypotheses developed from the results, 11 functional categories were combined to form a “double space” model. Open rooms can help students solve their problems by functioning as a space that fills the void between individual counseling and everyday life.
