Conduct research on social issues
Most of the output can be produced by software today.
An agent can find, read and summarise the sources this work depends on, and it can cover far more of them than a person would ever open. What it does not do is decide which sources deserve trust, or what the findings mean for your situation.
| How automatable | Mostly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Research and retrieval work |
| Jobs that do it | 11 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Web, data and docs, Generalist agents |
| O*NET activity | Getting Information (4.A.1.a.1) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 11 occupations that perform it.
- Direct or conduct studies or research on issues affecting areas of responsibility.
- Examine societal issues and their relationship with both technical systems and the environment.
- Study the socioeconomic impacts of new public policies, such as proposed legislation, taxes, services, and regulations.
- Analyze data from surveys, old records, or case studies, using statistical software.
- Analyze and interpret data to increase the understanding of human social behavior.
- Identify culturally specific beliefs and practices affecting health status and access to services for distinct populations and communities, in collaboration with medical and public health officials.
- Interpret and analyze policies, public issues, legislation, or the operations of governments, businesses, and organizations.
- Perform descriptive and multivariate statistical analyses of data, using computer software.
- Conduct social research.
- Conduct social research to advance knowledge in the social work field.
- Increase social work knowledge by reviewing current literature, conducting social research, or attending seminars, training workshops, or classes.
- Plan and conduct research to develop and test theories about societal issues such as crime, group relations, poverty, and aging.
- Develop approaches to the solution of groups' problems, based on research findings in sociology and related disciplines.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for research and retrieval work, and what it costs.
Research is the one shape of work that needs no integration at all, so a single $20 assistant with browsing is the whole stack. Add a crawler only once you are pulling hundreds of pages on a schedule rather than reading a few.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Generalist agents
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
11 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Research historical or social issues”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
| Activity | Jobs |
|---|---|
| Conduct anthropological or archaeological research | 3 |
| Conduct historical research | 3 |
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.