Measuring public attitudes toward stuttering : Eskişehir sample

It is known that stuttering is an undesired situation which causes society hold negative attitudes about and stigmatize people who stutter . In Turkey a systematic study about the public perception of the people who stutter does not exist. The purpose of this study is describing the attitudes toward stuttering and people who stutter in Eskişehir sample and leading to the studies aiming to determine country-wide attitudes in large samples.With this purpose, by probability sampling 96 children, 182 adults and 43 old indiviual (N=321) from Eskişehir were administered POSHA-E3 which is an experimental version of the Public Opinion Survey of Human Attributes. POSHA-E3 is an instrument used for assessing attitudes systematically while doing intercultural comparisons.Data collected were analyzed for the variables education, age and gender. According to the results of the statistical analysis, people who stutter are generally found to be shy, withdrawn, nervous and excited similar to the results of the previous studies. Results also indicated that; participants hold more negative attitudes toward stuttering and people who stutter, adults and old participants hold more negative attitudes toward stuttering and people who stutter than children. The women participants had more negative responses than positive ones and with the increasing education level negative responses were found to decrease.