The purpose of this study was to investigate (1) the structure of parents' gender-role expectation for their children, (2) the difference between mother's and father's gender-role expectation, and (3) the relation between parents' gender-role expectation and their children's flexibility of gender-role cognition.

　　Subjects were 70 preschool children and their parents. Parents were asked to evaluate the importance of forty-eight traits (ten masculine ones, ten feminine ones, and twenty-eight humane ones) for their children. Children were shown ten pictures of toys (three ones liked generally by boys, three ones by girls, and four ones by boys and girls), and asked to choose among the toys which three one they preferred (toy preference) and to classify them into a toy for boys, for girls, and for both boys and girls. The number of toys classified into the one for both boys and girls was defined as the flexibility score of gender-role cognition.

　　The followings are the main results obtained in the present study. First, parents' gender-role expectation consisted of masuculinity factor, humanity one, and femininity one. Second, fathers' expectation was higher than mothers'. Finally, girls with inconsistent parents, that is, one parent had high expectation and the other parent had low expectation, tended to have high flexibility of gender-role cognition.

　　The purpose of this study was to investigate junior college students' cognition pattens concerning gender roles in social contexts and family situations. Based on their cognition pattens junior college students have been divided into the following 4 groups: Traditional-Rigid type (TR), Traditional-Flexible type (TF), Nontraditional-Rigid type (NR), and Nontraditoinal-Flexible type (NF).

　　Hypotheses in this study were as follows: (1) NF-students recognize more information concerning gender roles than TR-students do, (2) NF-students have more knowledge about the roles of women and men in social situations than TR-students do, and (3) NF-students have more experiences of household sharing in their family than TR-students do.

　　48 junior college students were investigated using a questionnaire which this author made. It included measures of awareness of gender roles, knowledge of terms related to gender roles and social role-taking of women and men, and role-taking in the family, feeling within the traditional gender roles, sensitivity to topics regarding gender in mass communication, and household sharing in the subjects'own family.

　　The remarkable results are as follows.

　　1. NF-students feel more uncomfortable when they receive information concerning traditional gender roles than TR-students. Moreover, NF-students often try to reduce their discomfort by collecting more information about gender roles.

　　2. NF-students have more knowledge about women and men social situations than TR-students. But in general, many students still lack sufficient knowledge.

　　3. In the NF-students’ family, the children and fathers have more experiences of household sharing than in the TR-students'. role-sharing in household is more flexible in the NF-students' family than in the TR-students'.

　　The present article emphasizes on the concept of “needs” and “media” in family therapy. These two concepts have originally been used in the field of marketing and advertisement.

　　Families sometimes can't cope with the change of their “needs”, and occasionally ever lose “needs”. In such a case, family therapist should present technical informations for them to solve the problem, searching their lost needs or encouraging to cope with their needs.

　　In searching for the real needs of the family, therapist can use “media”, which is information process to search and realize the needs.

　　A case study is presented to clarify how to use "needs" and "media" in family therapy.

　　The case of 17 years old non-attendance-at-school boy was participated the joint family session for one year, 2 sessions a month. The family declared their “needs” after 25 media were employed and they developed self-organization toward the needs.

　　There is premise in the area of advertisement that the media is selected from the interactivity of a client and producer, because a producer is also a consumer when he/she is at home. The author considers that the premise can be applied to therapeutic situations.

　　The purpose of this study was to devise a questionnaire for family assessment and to check on its reliability and validity.

　　In a preparatory study, a sample of 227 families (father, mother and child; junior highschool student) were administered a questionnaire made up of 61-items about family functioning, eliminating inappropriate items.

　　Consequently, a 53-items questionnaire was devised and administered to a new sample of 524 families to compose the FAI (family assessment inventory). From the rotated equamax factor analysis, four factors were extracted. The factor structure for each subsamples (father, mother, and child) resembled each other closely. Results of three-mode principal component analysis showed that the factor structures of the father and mother subgroups were almost the same.

　　The FAI was further improved into a 30-items questionnaire developed out of the first attempt and was administered to a new sample of 417 families in order to check its reliability and factor validity. The Cronbach alphas for the 5 subscales ranged from .60 to .86. Results of the rotated equamax factor analysis were similar to those based on the first F AL At the same time, external validity was checked by using the family strength scale (FSS) on the same sample to give correlations between FSS and subscales of FAI. The correlations ranged from .46 to .79. The results were not in full agreement with the hypotheses based on Olson's circumplex model, but in case studies of three families that had some problems, results in accordance to Olson's hypotheses were found.

　　In conclusion, the FAI has been proven reliable and valid for estimating family functioning which is closely related clinical problems. However for large scale implement, there is some room for improvement.