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	Child Safety Assessment	Standardized Clinical Cutoff
Field	Social Work	Social Work
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2003	1991
Originator	Child protective services practice; codified in CPS guidance and Structured Decision Making	Neil S. Jacobson & Paula Truax
Type	Structured determination of whether a child faces immediate serious danger	Method for judging whether individual change on a standardized measure is reliable and clinically meaningful
Seminal source	Child Welfare Information Gateway. (2018). Child Protective Services: A Guide for Caseworkers. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Children's Bureau.	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	Safety Assessment (Child Welfare), Present Danger Assessment, Child Protective Services Safety Assessment, Safety Determination	Clinical Cutoff Score, Clinical Significance Method, Reliable Change Index, Jacobson-Truax Method
Related	4	3
Summary	Child safety assessment is the structured process child protective services uses to decide whether a child faces immediate, serious danger and, if so, what must be done right now to protect them. Unlike risk assessment, which estimates the probability of future maltreatment, safety assessment focuses on the present: it identifies active safety threats, weighs them against the child's vulnerability and the caregivers' capacity to protect, and reaches a safe-or-unsafe determination that, when unsafe, triggers an immediate safety plan up to and including removal.	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.