Not intelligent enough to become a social researcher?

Once you're past a relatively low threshold of intelligence (for values of intelligence meaning the ability to learn and communicate what you have learned to others in a way that others can understand) then intelligence rarely has anything to do with it at all. It's all about hard work. Are you a hard worker? It seems like you are, and you have the motivation to continue being one in the same field long enough to contribute a great deal of value. I know so many crackingly intelligent people, I'm related to them and by some standards I am one. I went to school with them and have been surrounded by "genius" level IQ people my entire life. The smartest and most successful scientists I know (and I know a lot) are all in the less "intelligent" category. Certainly they're smart, but their achievements are built one on top of another. People who are super genius smart tend to get easily frustrated, or change course wildly in the middle of their careers and have to start from scratch, or have utterly no patience to play any academic games or deal with the minutiae of startups. You have an advantage over these people that they will never attain: you have learned patience, and learning new things will remain gratifying to you for much longer in the same field. I think you can do it, and more importantly I think the world needs as many people like you as possible.

I have a master's and a Ph.D. The people in my program who weren't as smart as I am finished earlier and got better jobs.

Yeah, seconding (thirding?) that it is more about hard work than flat-out intelligence. If you get good enough grades in undergraduate to get into a good graduate program, then you are smart enough. The lack of confidence may be a bigger problem. You need to work on this as much as you can. Academic research is mostly about your ideas and results being shot down from as many angles as possible, as often as possible, and not always in a gentle way. That's supposedly a feature, not a bug, as it ensures published research is high quality. But you have to be pretty resilient to cope with the constant criticism. Thirdly, you say you don't want to do a PhD. I am not in psychology myself, but in a related discipline and I really do think that you need a PhD to have a career in academic psychology. If you don't have the time or stamina for that, as you say, then I don't think it's really feasible to aim for a research career in a university. But if you are willing to branch outside of academia (consulting, market research, etc), you can probably get hired with just a Masters.

I have a BA, MA and Ph.D. in Sociology. I am a senior manager in a for-profit social science and health behavior research firm. I am also the slowest thinker you will ever meet. When someone says something to me that is completely new, I am a bit flummoxed. I stare a little. It takes me a while to figure out what I think. I compensate for this by being very, very good at my job AND by anticipating all the angles -- at this point in my career, it's very rare that someone says something to me that I haven't already thought of. That sounds like bragging, but really it is a compensating behavior. I put a lot of time into thinking through all the possibilities from a given option -- like a chess player -- so that few things are new to me any more. One of my tricks is to think out loud. People think I'm giving them a well thought out analysis, when really I'm just chewing over whatever the issue is. I ask a lot of questions while I do this, and by the end they think I'm a genius, when really, all I've done is deployed a lot of dazzle to buy myself time to think. I didn't start my career like this. I started by working hard and being smart and doing a good job. I'm sure you'll do the same.

You could get work as an applied researcher with an MA in a policy field, like education or health; the focus there is usually statistics, though. Critical sociology is more of an academic subject, and working in that area that would definitely require a PhD. What lollusc said is true - intelligence is beside the point. My observation of those I know who are working (i.e., getting paid) in the fields to which you're drawn is that most of them are more or less - mostly more - efficient, organized, reliable, and good at self-promotion. That's also true of people doing well in any field. If you're lacking in these areas, I would advise that you work at developing related skills now, while you have access to the university infrastructure (counselling; learning support services; and student groups, which would give you an opportunity to learn and practice these behaviours without heavy consequences).

There's an old adage: "What do you call the guy with the lowest qualifying MCAT score?" "Still a doctor." Seriously, though, the problem with thinking you're not smart enough to do something is the thinking part, not the smart enough part. Baseline intelligence stopped mattering at some finite point in your teen years. I have been a hiring manager for ten years and I have never hired someone based on my perception of their intelligence, and I have never fired someone for not being smart enough. With very few exceptions, just being smart doesn't cut it once you're an adult in the working world.

In the social sciences, you build very incrementally off of other people's work, and in a rather strict way. Original ideas are not often valued, and if you have an original-to-you-idea, you'll be asked to cite someone who had that idea before you did. Your ideas are not "believable" if they haven't already been published. This is patently untrue. All science is incremental, but saying that one cannot have original ideas in the social sciences is just... strange. I have had plenty of original ideas that I have come up with, often based on what my data tells me, and I use that data or new data or both as a way to strengthen and support those ideas. And then I look to the literature to see whether anyone has had those ideas, and if so, how my work builds on that work. This is how social science works; this is how all science works. Social science research will never spur policy changes. Also incorrect. It is true that the gulf between research and practice is one that is often lamented, but practice-oriented disciplines do exist and the research that is being done in the academy does have a direct impact on both policy and on people's lives. Participatory action research is one such research method/model that has a direct impact on daily lives. You don't need to be a researcher with methods and research protocols, to learn something about people's lives - you could just ask them I'm afraid this is a gross misunderstanding of how social science works. "Just asking" someone about their lives is not what social scientists do; they use methods to ask questions that are meaningful and theoretically driven (or designed to drive theory). The reason that we use methods to "learn something about people's lives" is so that the knowledge can be verified and transferable. Research is not about obtaining "academic proof of ideas," it is about having a solid base upon which to build. People are not predictable in the ways natural substances are predictable. This is why many social science researchers do not identify themselves as positivists. It is much more about being able to produce large amounts of writing on a deadline, and whether or not you understand how academia works. Now, this one I'll agree with. Academics are essentially writers, and academia - like everything - is politics. So if you don't like the politics and you don't like to write, sure, academia probably is not for you. But you also aren't asking about becoming an academic - you're asking about whether or not you can obtain a master's degree in a practice-oriented discipline. To which the answer is yes, based on what you've written here.

Sorry, I meant "sociology" in my comment, not psychology. (I wrote that comment in a break from working on a document where I was writing "psychology" a lot. But when I wrote it I did have "sociology" in mind.)

For some perspective, the idea that intelligence matters more than effort is not universal. In eastern cultures, many people feel the opposite - that effort is much more important than inherent intelligence. There is always going to be someone smarter than you do so it's important to think of what other skills you can bring to the table.