Changing Polish university students’ attitudes toward cluttering

•Not all forms of intervention to improve fluency attitudes have been successful.•Attitude change interventions have predominantly focused on stuttering.•It is possible to positively modify the cluttering attitudes of university students.•Intervention success relies on it being suitable and participants ready to change. This quasi-experimental design study in Poland explored the extent to which attitudes toward cluttering of university students could be changed or improved after a series of activities dedicated to attaining deeper recognition of problems associated with fluency disorders. University students were assigned to either an Experimental or a Control group, with 39 in each (total = 78). They all completed the Polish version of the Public Opinion Survey of Human Attributes–Cluttering (POSHA–Cl) on two occasions up to eight weeks apart. Participants in the Experimental group attended the following intervention activities: watching and discussing an educational video on cluttering, participating in a workshop on the nature of cluttering, and watching and discussing a documentary on the life experiences of people struggling with fluency disorders. The Experimental group also filled out an open-ended questionnaire at the end of the study. Pre-intervention comparisons indicated that participants assigned to either of the Experimental or Control groups differed significantly on 2 of the 15 summary ratings (13 %) of their pre-POSHA–Cl attitudes toward cluttering. For the Experimental group, the intervention resulted in significant positive changes in cluttering attitudes on 8 of the 15 summary ratings (53 %). In contrast, pre- and post- POSHA–Cl scores for the Control group were essentially unchanged (0 of 15 ratings). This quasi-experimental study demonstrated that it is possible to positively modify the cluttering attitudes of university students. This has implications for the length, content, and experiential components of interventions designed to improve public attitudes toward fluency disorders.