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	Child Welfare Risk Assessment	Standardized Clinical Cutoff
Field	Social Work	Social Work
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2000	1991
Originator	Christopher Baird, Dennis Wagner & the actuarial child-welfare risk tradition (Children's Research Center)	Neil S. Jacobson & Paula Truax
Type	Estimation of the likelihood of future child maltreatment to guide service decisions	Method for judging whether individual change on a standardized measure is reliable and clinically meaningful
Seminal source	Baird, C., & Wagner, D. (2000). The relative validity of actuarial- and consensus-based risk assessment systems. Children and Youth Services Review, 22(11–12), 839–871.	Jacobson, N. S., & Truax, P. (1991). Clinical significance: A statistical approach to defining meaningful change in psychotherapy research. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 59(1), 12–19.
Aliases	Child Protective Services Risk Assessment, Family Risk Assessment, Actuarial Risk Assessment (Child Welfare), Risk of Future Maltreatment Assessment	Clinical Cutoff Score, Clinical Significance Method, Reliable Change Index, Jacobson-Truax Method
Related	4	3
Summary	Child welfare risk assessment estimates the likelihood that a child will be maltreated in the future, in order to guide decisions about case opening, service intensity, and ongoing monitoring. Actuarial systems — the most validated form, advanced by Christopher Baird, Dennis Wagner, and colleagues — score a small set of empirically weighted case characteristics into a risk level that statistically predicts future maltreatment, and have been shown to outperform consensus-based clinical judgment in reliability and predictive validity. Risk assessment is distinct from, and complementary to, the safety assessment that addresses immediate danger.	The standardized clinical cutoff approach, developed by Jacobson and Truax, judges whether an individual client's change on a standardized measure is both statistically reliable and clinically meaningful. It pairs a Reliable Change Index — which asks whether a pre-to-post change is larger than the measurement error of the instrument — with a cutoff score that marks the boundary between the dysfunctional and functional (normal) populations. A client who moves reliably across that cutoff is counted as recovered, giving practice and research a defensible, individual-level definition of meaningful improvement.