Stouffer's work in World War II led to the Expert and Combat Infantryman Badges, revision of pay scales, the demobilization point system, and influenced what appeared in Yank, the Army Weekly, Stars & Stripes, and Frank Capra's “Why We Fight” propaganda films.

Additionally, it was Stouffer and his colleagues who during their research for The American Soldier developed the important sociological concept of “relative deprivation”, which roughly stated is the idea that one determines his status based on comparison with others.

Historian Edward Gitre wrote of this project:The handwritten commentaries the researchers preserved — photographed in 1947, and amounting to some 65,000 pages — capture for posterity converging and diverging plotlines that ran through the same organization.

[... W]ith the indispensable help of volunteer citizen-archivists on the 1.7 million member Zooniverse crowdsourcing platform, the entire collection of now-digitized commentaries are being transcribed, so the public can finally access and read them.

Through both anecdotal and highly disciplined research data, Stouffer illuminated the attitudes of Americans to nonconformist behavior in general, and to what liberals considered the intolerance of the McCarthy Era in particular.

Although he found no “national neurosis”, what he did find was that Americans remained mostly concerned about their day-to-day existence – an important discovery in the face of an increasingly mass-culture society.

He also consulted with scores of private and public institutes, a partial listing of which includes: Stouffer is described by his family and those who knew him well as a gentleman of warmth, compassion, restless energy, high standards, depth, and a puckish sense of humor.

Deeply intellectually curious and impatient for survey results, Stouffer frequently sat by the IBM punched card sifting machine to see the raw answers to his queries.

As James Davis writes in the introduction to Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties (reprinted in 1992 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick), “Sam was a great sociologist….” Samuel Stouffer's influence reaches well beyond military history and sociology.