Compare methods

	Clinical Significance Analysis	Reliable Change Index
Field	Social Work	Social Work
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1991	1991
Originator	Neil S. Jacobson & Paula Truax	Neil S. Jacobson & Paula Truax
Type	Two-part classification of whether individual change is both reliable and meaningful	Statistical index of whether an individual client's change exceeds measurement error
Seminal source	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.	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	Clinical Significance, Jacobson-Truax Method, Clinically Significant Change, Recovery Classification	RCI, Reliable Change Index (Jacobson-Truax), Jacobson-Truax Reliable Change, Reliable Change Criterion
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	The Reliable Change Index (RCI) is a statistic that tells whether the change in an individual client's score on a measure, from before to after an intervention, is large enough that it is unlikely to be an artifact of the instrument's measurement error. Introduced by Neil Jacobson and Paula Truax in 1991 as one half of their two-part definition of clinically significant change, it converts a pre-post difference into a standardized value and compares it against a critical cutoff, typically 1.96, so that practitioners and researchers can classify each client as reliably improved, unchanged, or reliably deteriorated.