Compare methods

	Clinical Significance Analysis	Single-System Design
Field	Social Work	Social Work
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1991	2009
Originator	Neil S. Jacobson & Paula Truax	Martin Bloom, Joel Fischer & John G. Orme (codification in social work)
Type	Two-part classification of whether individual change is both reliable and meaningful	Time-series design for evaluating intervention with a single client system
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.	Bloom, M., Fischer, J., & Orme, J. G. (2009). Evaluating Practice: Guidelines for the Accountable Professional (6th ed.). Pearson/Allyn & Bacon. ISBN: 9780205458066
Aliases	Clinical Significance, Jacobson-Truax Method, Clinically Significant Change, Recovery Classification	Single-Subject Design, Single-Case Design, N-of-1 Design, Single-System Evaluation
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.	A single-system design is a time-series approach to evaluating practice in which a single client system — an individual, family, group, or organization — is measured repeatedly on a clearly defined target before and during (and sometimes after) an intervention. By tracking the same system over time rather than comparing a treatment group to a control group, it lets a practitioner judge whether their own intervention is associated with change in the people they actually serve. It is the methodological backbone of the 'accountable professional' tradition codified by Bloom, Fischer, and Orme.