A series of studies on :he relationship between children's responses to play inventories and their acruzl free play behavior was planned in collaboration with Vaughn J. Crandall of Fels Research Institute, 0hio.Vrior to the death of Dr. Crandall two initial studies were made at the Fels Day Camp during the summers of 1962 and 1963. Each study involved 50 elementary school age children equally divided as to sex and distributed throughout Grades 1 to 6. The play inventory items were derived from a list which had been shown to have discriminating power in a series of earlier studies (3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11). The children were rated for their competence and participation in masculine and feminine free-play activities. There were problems in establishing an adequately high degree of reliability for some of these ratings. Ratings were also available for other dimensions of free-play behavior (including dependency, aggression, passivity, and achievement) which had been used in Dr. Crandall's large scale studies of children's achievement behaviors ( 1 ) . In the first study involving a play scale composed mainly of formal games and mature items (2), there were consistent relations berween girls' play preferences and their free. play participation and competence. For boys there was no such general relationship between scale responses and free-play behavior. However, sex inappropriate responses did correlate with dependency behavior toward adults, a finding consistent with those of earlier studies (5, 9). In the second study a more inclusive play scale was employed, involving many informal plays as well as games, and many more immarure items (7). In addition, masculine and feminine responses were scored separately rather than combined in one score as in the first study. The results indicated what appeared to be a response set operating for both boys and girls; those who tended to make many responses to the masculine scale also tended to make many responses to the feminine scale. In general, the correlates suggested that high responding girls tended to be more intelligent and more masculine in their free-play behaviors, and the high responding boys tended to be younger and more feminine in their free-play behaviors. The tentative conclusion from these two preliminary studies was that systematic, if not direct, relztionships exist between certain types of play preference and play behaviors and that play scales may be a potential diagnostic device 'A full report of these preliminary studies including tables is available from the American Documentation Institute, Auxiliary Publications Project, Photoduplication Service, Library of Congress, Washington 25, D. C. Remit $2.50 for photocopies or $1.75 for 35-mm. microfilm of Document No. 8111. This research was aided by a grant from U. S. P. H., MH-2238.