This qualitative study explored the gendered professional experiences of male elementary school counselors. The participants or co-researchers were twelve men of varied ethnic and racial backgrounds between 25 and 60 years old. They lived and worked in five US states in urban, suburban and rural settings. They provided school counseling program services to students from 4-12 years old. All co-researchers had graduate degrees in counseling and state certification as school counselors. Their professional experience ranged from 2-20 years. The research utilized phenomenological methodology to uncover the “essence ” of their experiences as male elementary school counselors. Co-researchers were interviewed up to three times for at least 45 minutes total. The interviews of all participants were recorded, transcribed verbatim, and then analyzed at four levels. First, a textural analysis of all relevant statements to the experience of being a male elementary school counselor was done. Second, a structural analysis was done to identify important contextual factors that helped to shape the experiences. Third, a textural-structural analysis was done to explore the connection between structural factors and the actual experience of being a male elementary school counselor. The final level of

Avatar customization is available in many games, but as yet there is no analytical framework capable of enabling systematic comparison between games. To investigate this issue, we present our novel analytical framework, referred to as the Avatar Affordances Framework. To model the framework, we analyze the character creation interfaces of 20 games. We focus in particular on the different ways gender and ethnicity are presented to players. Preliminary analysis reveals that many popular games have socially exclusive values, and that high fidelity character creation interfaces are no exception. The framework itself offers a more comprehensive tool than previous (e.g., count-based) approaches to investigating self-representation issues in character creation interfaces.

The purpose of this paper is to examine epistemological connections between the words used by psychologists, the way words influence what methodology we use, and how meth-ods influence our beliefs about causality and construct phenomena regarded as psychologi-cal "facts. " These processes are considered in terms of a personal and historical perspective gained from nearly forty years of studying the psychology of women and gender. This pa-per focuses the history of the distinction between "sex " and "gender " and the continued at-tention of researchers to the question of whether sex/gender differences exist. It argues that the issue continues to be researched because of the relative absence of socio-structural variables such as status and power from most psychological discourse and the current empirical focus of many feminist psychologists in the United States. I also argue that lack of attention to epistemology and to the connection between politics and scholar-ship has led to a definition of the psychology of women and/or gender that no longer at-tends to feminist theory and to a decline in socially activist scholarship. Women and men cannot be studied in isolation from other social constructions such as race/ethnicity, social class, sexual diversity, and cultural difference. Such synthesis will be difficult without a return to concerns about epistemology and question generation that are rarely addressed in U. S. feminist psychology today.