Practice and Training in Family Therapy: A Known Group Study

The present study reports on a comparative survey of the belief and action systems of graduates who had been intensively trained in one of three of the major models of family therapy: Bowenian, communications, and strategic. An analysis of the factor-analyzed assumptions (belief system) and style (action system) items showed consistently greater divergence among the three models than convergence, as well as a remarkable synchronicity between the respective literature on these three models and their implementation, as represented by family therapists intensively trained in each model. A comparison of the present study's findings with previous research strongly supports the potency of formal and intensive training for developing adherents of a particular model and suggests that the distinctiveness of each model needs to be more fully developed in preference to premature attempts to develop generic or inclusive models that may become internally inconsistent and therefore difficult to operationalize in practice.