Compare methods

	Clinical Significance Analysis	Standardized Clinical Cutoff
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	Method for judging whether individual change on a standardized measure is reliable and clinically meaningful
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	Clinical Cutoff Score, Clinical Significance Method, Reliable Change Index, Jacobson-Truax Method
Related	4	3
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 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.