The first goal of this study was to clarify the feeling of welfare office staff for the role of family counselors. The second purpose was to study correlations between the worker’s feeling for their role and the institution’s environment, worker’s attitudes toward their jobs, and social support. This survey was conducted with 295 female family counselors by means of mail questionnaires.

The role feeling items of family counselors were prepared taking account of the concepts of role conflict and role ambiguity, and a two point scale was used with the principal components of role ambiguity of the job and discontent with the job. A hierarchical regression analysis was conducted with these criterion variables. Using the 15 explanatory variables obtaind, role ambiguity was shown to be.651(R²＝.424) and was strongly influenced by internal variables such as attitude variables (sense of fulfillment & motivation), age and length of experience. It was also shown that job dissatisfaction, scal .563 (R²＝.317), is strongly influenced not only by internal variables (sense of fulfillment, incentive) but also by external variables such as support from the reception desk and child guidance clinic.

Online groups in which people who share interests and/or problems participate are expanding. The purpose of this article is to review researches on online groups from the point of view of mutual-aid among peers and intervention by human service professionals. The online groups are divided into two categories, one is mutual-aid online groups and the other is online support groups. It has been emphasized that many mutual-aid online groups in which human service professionals don’t play directive role work as a new form of self-help resource. In studies of online intervention by the professionals including online support groups, some positive effects have been reported. However, both forms of research don’t contain enough data and their effectiveness has to be confirmed through further study. In these additional studies attention must be paid to not only the positive side but also the negative side of computer-network mediated “help.”