EXPOSED
This residual category bundles forensic, health, sport, developmental, and research psychologists — the modal worker sits in government, hospital, university, or consulting settings doing assessment, program evaluation, research design, and report writing rather than a full-time therapy caseload. Literature review, survey and test-score analysis, protocol drafting, and first-draft evaluation reports are now cheap for AI, which hollows out a large share of billable hours. What holds is the in-person clinical interview and behavioral observation, expert testimony and defensible sign-off on high-stakes determinations (custody, fitness-for-duty, risk of violence), and ownership of interpretive calls where instruments disagree — though only the licensed subset carries a real regulatory shield, and that shield is a policy choice, not physics.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. At 11 the split is roughly even: the literature synthesis, scale scoring, norm comparison, regression on program-evaluation data, and boilerplate sections of a psychological report are already machine work, while the structured clinical interview, behavioral observation of a child or a police officer under stress, and cross-examination-proof formulation of findings still require a person in the room.
Some physical or field component. A 6 reflects travel to jails, schools, clinics, training facilities and courtrooms plus hands-on test administration — WAIS blocks, gait or exertion protocols, developmental play tasks — but the environments are booked rooms with controlled conditions, and most of the week is still spent at a desk writing.
Certification preferred, not legally required. 10 is the honest average of a mixed group: forensic and health psychologists in this residual bucket typically hold state licences and their signature on a fitness-for-duty or risk assessment is personally discoverable, but sport consultants, program evaluators, and PhD research psychologists in this same SOC code often practise under titles that no state licensing board controls.
The human relationship is the product. 13 sits at the point where relationship becomes the deliverable: a judge, a general counsel, a team's coaching staff, or a school district retains a specific named psychologist whose prior testimony and reputation they trust, and referral streams follow the individual rather than the practice — but unlike a therapist's caseload, most engagements are episodic and end when the report is filed.
Exists to be accountable for ambiguous calls. 14 is earned by the calls with no clean answer and real consequences — recommending a custody arrangement, declaring an officer unfit to return to duty, estimating violence risk when the PAI and the collateral records disagree, deciding whether a validity scale means malingering — where the psychologist names one conclusion and defends it under oath.
Psychiatrists SAFE
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