WHAT DOES EFFECTIVENESS MEAN?
Effectiveness is the main noun form of the adjective effective, which means “adequate to accomplish a purpose; producing the intended or expected result.” (Another, less common noun form of effective is effectivity.)
So, if you are measuring something’s effectiveness, you are looking at how well it does whatever it is supposed to do. If a dish soap only kills a small amount of germs on dishes, for example, it has poor effectiveness.
The adjective effective comes from the noun effect. An effect is “something that is produced by an agency or cause; result; consequence.” The word effect is often confused with the word affect, which is often used as a verb to mean “to produce an effect or change.”
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WHAT DOES EFFICACY MEAN?
Efficacy is “capacity for producing a desired result or effect; effectiveness.” The adjective form efficacious means “capable of having the desired result or effect.”
⠀You may have encountered the word efficacy used in the term self-efficacy, which refers to a person’s belief that they can accomplish what they set out to do. For instance, a student has high self-efficacy if they take on a challenging job, fresh out of college with little experience, convinced they’ll succeed. Efficacy and effectiveness are close enough in meaning that they are often used interchangeably in general contexts.
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CAREFUL: EFFECTIVE IS NOT THE SAME AS EFFICIENT
Neither of these words should be confused with efficiency, which is “the state or quality of being efficient, or able to accomplish something with the least waste of time and effort; competency in performance.” You can think of efficiency as going a step further: it not only measures how well something does its job, but how quickly and/or cheaply it can do it.
From Dictionary.com
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