Methodology
What is Structured Professional Judgment?
Structured Professional Judgment (SPJ) is an evidence-based risk assessment approach that combines the structure of actuarial tools with the flexibility of unstructured clinical judgment. SPJ tools provide practitioners with a defined set of empirically-grounded risk factors while preserving their professional authority to weigh these factors in context.
Key Principles of SPJ
- Each risk factor is grounded in peer-reviewed or validated evidence
- Practitioners rate factors as present, possibly present, or not present — not as numeric scores
- Final risk level reflects professional judgment, not a sum of scores
- Regular re-assessment is built into the process
How AIR-SPJ Applies SPJ
The AIR-SPJ framework follows SPJ methodology for the novel domain of AI interaction risk. Rather than producing a score, it provides practitioners with structured domains and elements to consider when AI interaction is present or suspected in a case — each linked to the best available evidence.
Not a scoring tool:
AIR-SPJ is designed to support structured thinking and documentation — not to generate risk scores or prediction outputs.