The importance of the role of caring in human behavior has recently been recognized as Mayeroff conceptualizes caring as a process of helping the other to grow and actualize himself. The purpose of this paper is to present a validation study of a self report inventory of giving care and receiving care. The reliability of the former was .799, the latter, .832. Both instruments consisted of 50 items which were scored on a five-point score from most like me to least like me. The two inventories were presented to 117 persons. There were 61 carers and 56 non-carers which included 60 males and 57 females. Role theory was used to categorize carers and non-carers. Two 2 x 2 ANOVAs were used to analyze the results. On the caring inventory, carers differed significantly from non-carers, and six interacted with caring. No significant differences were found on the receiving care inventory. (Author)