To develop rehabilitative treatment programs for persons who have committed crimes, correctional psychologists build theoretical structures that weld theoretical ideas about the causes of criminal behavior, theoretical perspectives about appropriate targets for correctional intervention and normative assumptions about crime and the aims of correctional intervention. To differentiate the tri-partite theoretical structure with which correctional program designers' work, Ward and Durrant (2021) introduce the metatheoretical concept of “practice frameworks”. In this paper, I describe and evaluate this concept, situating my analysis within the broader contexts of philosophical work on scientific theories and models and metatheoretical work on the structure of explanatory and intervention theories in correctional psychology.

为了为犯罪者制定康复治疗计划，矫正心理学家构建了理论结构，将关于犯罪行为原因的理论思想、关于矫正干预的适当目标的理论观点以及关于犯罪的规范假设和矫正干预的目标融合在一起。为了区分矫正计划设计者的工作所采用的三方理论结构，Ward 和 Durrant（2021）引入了“实践框架”的元理论概念。在本文中，我描述和评估了这个概念，将我的分析置于更广泛的背景下，即科学理论和模型的哲学工作以及矫正心理学中解释和干预理论结构的元理论工作。