Samuel Andrew Stouffer (June 6, 1900 – August 24, 1960) was a prominent American sociologist and developer of survey research techniques. Stouffer spent much of his career attempting to answer the fundamental question: How does one measure an attitude?

Stouffer served as a professor of sociology at both the University of Chicago and Harvard University, and also directed the Laboratory of Social Relations at Harvard.

Born in Sac City, Iowa, Stouffer received a Bachelor of Arts at Morningside College, Sioux City in 1921, then went on to earn a Master of Arts in English at Harvard University in 1923. He returned to Sac City in 1923 to manage and edit his father's newspaper, the Sac Sun, until 1926 when he sold it and started his doctoral studies. During that time, he married Ruth McBurney in 1924, with whom he had three children. Stouffer earned his PhD in sociology in 1930 at the University of Chicago. His dissertation was “An Experimental Comparison of Statistical and Case-History Methods of Attitude Research,” supervised by Herbert Blumer. He then served as a professor of sociology, statistics, and social statistics at universities such as the University of Chicago, the University of London, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

(Princeton University Press, 1949).

Stouffer and a distinguished team of social scientists working for the War Department surveyed over a half million American soldiers during World War II using interviews, over two hundred questionnaires, and other techniques to determine their attitudes on everything from racial integration to their officers’ performance. Their answers, almost always complex and often also counterintuitive, reveal individuals both defining and defined by their society and their primary groups. 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.

The research was published in 4 volumes:

After Stouffer's death, the punch cards for the unclassified surveys used in The American Soldier were digitized by the Roper Center and are now available from the US National Archives; for details, see "A Finding Aid to Records Relating to Personal Participation in World War II (The American Soldier" Surveys)". Microfilms of the soldiers' handwritten responses to the survey questions are also held by the US National Archives and by 2019 were digitized as images so that they could be transcribed for full-text searching. 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.