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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have a PhD in a social science (economics). I would never call myself a scientist. I think it is pretty clear what people mean by the term scientist. Computer science might be as far as I would go.[/quote]

First, OP should call her sister a social scientist.  Her achievement is commendable and respectable, but mislabeling doesn't help her receive that respect.  Modern colloquial use of "science" and "scientist" without an adjective is synonymous with "hard science" or "hard scientist".  The common understanding is this includes subjects like Physics, Biology, Chemistry, etc.  These are typically subjects in which the rules/laws of the subject are bound and constrained.  Researchers here discover the way the natural laws of these subjects behave and govern the topic.

The social sciences are no less respectable, but it is important to classify so that people understand where her achievements lie.  No one would call an economist, a statistician, a psychologist, a linguist, or many other graduates in the social sciences, a scientist, so neither would you call a specialist in education.  However, calling her a social scientist then categorizes her into the realm of subjects where people create paradigms or ways to process information differently.  There are no hard laws in the social sciences.  The subject matter is more nebulous and subject to change, but it is still important to study and create rules to analyze and achieve.  The closest that a social science comes to a hard science is in science fiction.  In Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, in the future, a man named Hari Seldon, uses macro social sciences to create psychohistory and uses a combination of history, statistics, and sociology to predict the behavior or large masses of people, basically quantifying human behavior of large groups.  He uses it to predict key historic events with an unbelievable accuracy until the development of an anomaly that did not fit the large scale social models.

As for the PP above, I personally would not categorize Computer Science as a science.  Computer science is a lot closer to an Engineering subject than a Science subject.  There are a few at the forefront of computer science who are doing research into developing new technology, but the vast majority of computer science is applied science which is usually categorized as Engineering rather than Science.  And I say this as a person with a Computer Engineering degree (earned before my college had a Computer Science department/degree).

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