Treatment Changes Clinical Significance Method: Properties, Calculation Method, Decision Making and Limitations

Statistical significant methods are usually used to evaluate the effectiveness of the psychological treatments however, these methods have a number of inherent limitations. In fact, significant differences between the pre-treatment and post-treatment scores of patients per se do not necessarily indicate that the patients have reached the level of successful performance in their real life. Thus, those methods are required which supplement statistical significance tests and reflect more precise results of psychological treatments effectiveness in addition to pass inevitable limitations of statistical methods. One of these methods is clinical significance of the treatment changes. Based on this method, a change in therapy is clinically significant if a patient moves from “dysfunctional group due to disease” to the “functional group” during the course of the treatment. This paper will discuss the Jacobsen and Traux method due to its simplicity and fame. Also, it will show how to calculate the clinical significance change and finally indicates decision making criteria and limitations of the method for clinical psychologists.