COOKED
The daily work — drafting questionnaire items, coding open-ended responses, cleaning datasets, running weighting and crosstabs, writing topline reports and slide decks — is exactly the text-and-tabular pattern work current models handle at usable quality. What resists is sampling-frame design under coverage error, deciding whether a nonresponse-adjusted estimate is defensible enough to publish, and owning the methodology when a client or reporter attacks the numbers. There is no license, no signature requirement, and buyers rarely pay for a relationship with the researcher rather than the finding.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. A 7 rather than a 12 because item wording, open-end coding, weighting scripts, and topline write-ups — the bulk of billable hours — are all reproducible by a model, and the genuinely resistant parts (choosing between an address-based frame and a nonprobability panel when coverage is broken, judging whether a 4% response rate estimate can be published at all) are a small slice of the week rather than the spine of it.
Fully desk- and screen-based. A 3 rather than 0 acknowledges the occasional intercept survey, cognitive-interview pretest, or field-interviewer training session, but the job is otherwise Qualtrics, Stata/R, and a laptop, with no equipment to handle and no site to visit.
No licence, no signature requirement. A 1 reflects that nothing gates entry — no state license, no PSTAT-style credential requirement, no signature block on a deliverable — and AAPOR's Transparency Initiative and Code of Professional Ethics bind by disclosure norms and reputational sanction, not by any statute that could name you personally.
Some relationship component. A 6 rather than 2 because ongoing government and tracking-survey contracts do reward a known methodologist who understands a client's frame and question history, but procurement is competitive and buyers are purchasing the estimate and the margin of error, not you — swap researchers mid-contract and the client barely notices.
Meaningful discretion. A 9 sits in the discretion band because the real calls — post-stratification raking targets, whether to weight a nonprobability sample at all, how to flag straightlining, what caveats go in the methods statement — are yours and are second-guessed by reporters and clients, but they run against established AAPOR and Census guidance and a bad choice yields a criticized poll rather than an injury or a lost case.
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