Developing and Testing Theory

February 2024     Videos     Dr. Bowen Talking to the Special Postgraduate Program     Tape VB0472, Part Five

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Dr. Bowen Talking to the Special Postgraduate Program, Tape VB0472, Part Five from TMBAP on Vimeo.

In this video, Dr. Bowen describes his methodology when first developing and testing his theory. At the beginning, he developed the device “theory comes first” as a guiding principle. The effort of working on theory first was to draw things out in detail so that one can anticipate and make sense of what comes up in practice. Once the theory had been developed, the effort around testing its validity required observing if any problems that came up were in the people using the theory or in the theory itself—with the latter requiring substantially more time to fix. The theory eventually became his impersonal rule book, but at the beginning, there were a lot of problems with the rule book. From June 7-8, 1988.