Compare methods

	Standardized Clinical Cutoff	Goal Attainment Scaling	Single-System Design
Field	Social Work	Social Work	Social Work
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1991	1968	2009
Originator	Neil S. Jacobson & Paula Truax	Thomas J. Kiresuk & Robert E. Sherman	Martin Bloom, Joel Fischer & John G. Orme (codification in social work)
Type	Method for judging whether individual change on a standardized measure is reliable and clinically meaningful	Individualized, criterion-referenced outcome measurement procedure	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.	Kiresuk, T. J., & Sherman, R. E. (1968). Goal attainment scaling: A general method for evaluating comprehensive community mental health programs. Community Mental Health Journal, 4(6), 443–453.	Bloom, M., Fischer, J., & Orme, J. G. (2009). Evaluating Practice: Guidelines for the Accountable Professional (6th ed.). Pearson/Allyn & Bacon. ISBN: 9780205458066
Aliases	Clinical Cutoff Score, Clinical Significance Method, Reliable Change Index, Jacobson-Truax Method	GAS, Goal Attainment Scale, Kiresuk-Sherman Goal Attainment Scaling, Individualized Goal Scaling	Single-Subject Design, Single-Case Design, N-of-1 Design, Single-System Evaluation
Related	3	3	4
Summary	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.	Goal Attainment Scaling (GAS) is a method for measuring the outcomes of an individualized intervention by writing, in advance, a small set of client-specific goals and defining for each a graded scale of possible outcomes from much worse than expected to much better than expected. After the intervention, the actual outcome on each goal is scored on this scale and the scores are combined into a single standardized index, allowing idiosyncratic, personally meaningful goals to be aggregated and compared across clients and programs. It was introduced by Thomas Kiresuk and Robert Sherman in 1968 to evaluate community mental health programs.	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.