ABSTRACT
This chapter considers change in people in prison, on community sentences or in mental health facilities because of repeated criminal or violent behaviour, where assessment of change is pertinent because of its relationship to criminal risk and thus is most often based on dynamic risk factors. Change assessments are usually undertaken for two main purposes: to evaluate the effects of a specific intervention, and to determine whether an offender's current level of risk has reduced or remains above a specific legal threshold. The accuracy of change assessments is inevitably evaluated against distal and indirect outcomes. The clinically significant change (CSC) approach is based on the premise that a measure – usually an offender self-report questionnaire – is collecting information on a clinically relevant problem that is linked to offending, and that change is only significant when the person's pre-change score was in a range indicative of clinical-level dysfunction.
