{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/social-scientists-and-related-workers-all-other/", "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology", "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.", "scored_at": "2026-08-11", "model": "claude-opus-5", "occupation": { "title": "Social Scientists and Related Workers, All Other", "soc_code": "19-3099", "category": "Science", "us_employment": 37100, "median_annual_wage": 101110 }, "verdict": "COOKED", "risk_resistance": 31, "contested": false, "near_boundary": false, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 8, "embodiment": 5, "liability_shield": 2, "trust_premium": 6, "judgment_accountability": 10 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "The recurring deliverables here — coding a 40,000-record ACS or NIBRS extract, drafting Likert batteries, running fixed-effects models and writing the 30-page evaluation report — are draftable by current models, and the 8 rather than 4 reflects the residual that isn't: specifying identification strategy when the treatment wasn't randomized, negotiating data-use agreements with agencies, and defending a sampling frame to an IRB that will ask why you excluded a subpopulation.", "embodiment": "Most weeks are entirely laptop-and-VPN against restricted-use data enclaves, but the 5 covers the fieldwork tail — running focus groups, ride-alongs and site visits for a corrections or housing program evaluation, intercept surveys, and enumerator training that has to happen in the room.", "liability_shield": "There is no licensing board for demographers or criminologists; a bad population projection or misspecified recidivism model produces a corrected erratum and a lost contract, not a suspension, and the 2 rather than 0 exists only because IRB approval and FISMA/Census DRB disclosure review put a named human on the certification.", "trust_premium": "Agency clients and foundation program officers do re-hire the evaluator who understood their intervention last cycle, but the deliverable is a report that gets read by people who never met you, and much of the work arrives through RFP competition where the methods section, not the name, wins the bid.", "judgment_accountability": "The 10 reflects calls that are genuinely yours — whether a null result gets reported as null, whether a subgroup n=61 is too thin to publish, how to describe a racial disparity in a policing dataset — but they land in a peer-reviewed or committee-vetted document with co-authors and a sponsor's review, not as a single unreviewable decision with someone's liberty or money attached." }, "rationale": "This catch-all category — demographers, criminologists, program evaluators, policy and behavioral researchers in agencies, think tanks, and consultancies — spends most hours on literature synthesis, survey instrument drafting, cleaning and coding datasets, running regressions in R/Stata/SPSS, and writing up findings in reports and briefs. Those are precisely the text-and-pattern tasks current models do at usable draft quality, and there is no license, stamp, or signature protecting the output. What persists is research design under ambiguity, primary data collection with human subjects, IRB-defensible methodology choices, and standing behind a politically contested finding in front of a board or legislature.", "outlook": "Headcount in report-production and secondary-data analysis roles shrinks noticeably by the mid-2030s, while a smaller tier of study designers, field-data owners, and testifying evaluators holds or gains value.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "If federal evaluation policy tightens the named-evaluator requirement — e.g. OMB/Evidence Act implementation guidance or agency Learning Agendas requiring a named senior evaluator to personally attest that design, sampling, and limitations statements are their own professional judgment, as GAO has pushed on evidence-quality attestation — the role's remaining hours concentrate in defensible, attributable calls rather than drafting", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "Genuine two-tier structure: if literature synthesis, coding, and regression scripting are absorbed, the residual job is research design under contested causal identification, IRB protocol construction, and primary human-subjects collection (cognitive interviews, hard-to-reach sampling frames, field experiments) that cannot be scraped. Also rises if journals/funders adopt AI-disclosure rules (already at NIH, which bars AI-drafted peer review, and at Nature/ICMJE) requiring human-attributable methodology sections", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "Narrow routes only: if forensic/criminological expert testimony rules harden — Rule 702's 2023 amendment already puts the burden on the proponent to show reliability, and courts have begun excluding AI-assisted analysis whose method the witness cannot personally explain — the litigation-facing subset gains a de facto signature requirement. Some states also require licensed or credentialed statisticians for official demographic certifications (census challenges, redistricting deposition work)", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "If major foundations and government contracting vehicles add AI-provenance clauses — as some GSA and state RFPs have begun doing — requiring identified human researchers of record and barring undisclosed model-generated analysis, buyers are purchasing human authorship explicitly rather than incidentally", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "embodiment", "change": "No plausible route beyond existing field-collection work; site-based interviewing and ethnography do not scale enough to move the score", "plausibility": "unlikely", "would_add": 1 } ], "ceiling_note": "Even with every lever, this SOC is capped in the mid-50s. It is a residual category with no licensing body, no credential registry, and no single professional association able to impose a signature requirement — the structural things that lift lawyers and engineers simply do not exist here. Gains accrue unevenly: the litigation-facing criminologist and the named federal evaluator can be protected; the think-tank policy writer and the contract data cleaner largely cannot." }, "adjudication": null, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 35490, "wage": 79370 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 35530, "wage": 81340 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 33690, "wage": 83330 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 34570, "wage": 87260 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 34330, "wage": 84430 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 33210, "wage": 88900 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 35210, "wage": 95890 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 36970, "wage": 100340 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 37100, "wage": 101110 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": 4.5, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [ { "slug": "transportation-storage-and-distribution-managers", "title": "Transportation, Storage, and Distribution Managers", "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 53, "median_wage": 107230, "overlap": 65, "skills_to_close": [ "Management of Material Resources", "Management of Financial Resources", "Monitoring", "Quality Control Analysis" ] } ], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }