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Reliable Change Index/Evidence
Method evidence record

Reliable Change Index

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.

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Source record

Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.

Reliable Change Index for Individual Outcome Evaluation
Taxonomic method record · process-pipeline / social-work
  • 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. · DOI 10.1037/0022-006X.59.1.12
  • Christensen, L., & Mendoza, J. L. (1986). A method of assessing change in a single subject: An alteration of the RC index. Behavior Therapy, 17(3), 305–308. · DOI 10.1016/S0005-7894(86)80060-0
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Related methods

Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.

Same method familyClinical Significance Analysismachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Same method familyRoutine Outcome Monitoringmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Same method familySingle-System Designmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Same method familyStandardized Clinical Cutoffmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.

Evidence status

Sources recorded, not reviewed

Bibliographic sources are present. Claim-level evidence review has not been performed.

Sources

2 recorded citations, copied from the method source record.

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