Clinical Significance Analysis

Clinical significance analysis is a method for deciding whether an individual client's change after treatment is not only statistically reliable but also meaningful in real-world terms — specifically, whether the client has moved out of the dysfunctional range and into the range typical of a functional or non-clinical population. Formalized by Neil Jacobson and Paula Truax in 1991, it combines a reliable-change criterion with a clinical cutoff to sort each client into categories such as recovered, improved, unchanged, or deteriorated, complementing group-level statistics that say nothing about individual benefit.