Loneliness in archers and athletes: Buyrukoğlu 2023

The study compares four groups of athletes from the province of Aydın, in Turkey: 28 in athletics, 30 in dance, 35 in fitness and 25 archers, 118 in all. All of them filled in two questionnaires, one on loneliness and one on mental toughness in sport, which has three parts: confidence, commitment and control.

The archers have the highest average for confidence (21.04, against 16.34 for fitness, the lowest) and for commitment (14.12), but the lowest for control (8.08, against 10.91 for fitness). On loneliness they sit in the middle, at 64.04 points, between fitness (56.83) and athletics (67.11). The differences between the four sports are statistically significant on all four measures but small: the analysis's own indices show that these measures do little to separate the groups. Using the four scores to guess each person's sport, the discriminant analysis placed 16 of the 25 archers correctly (64%) and 55.9% of the athletes overall, with fitness at 77.1% and dance at 36.7%.

The questionnaires reached the athletes through their club coaches, as a Google form, and volunteers replied. Loneliness is measured with the Turkish version of the UCLA scale, 20 items scored from 20 to 80, where higher means lonelier; mental toughness with the 13-item Turkish adaptation of Sheard's sport mental toughness questionnaire. A short form collected sex, age, sport, years of practice and national team selection: of the 118 people, 68 were women, 66 were over 20 and 15 had been selected for a national team.

The main analysis is a discriminant analysis, which looks for the combination of the four scores that best tells the sports apart and then checks how many people it puts back in the right sport.

All that is known about the archers is that there were 25 of them and they shot in that province: their discipline, level, age, years of shooting and number of national team members are not given, so the differences may come from who answered rather than from the sport. The sample is voluntary and gathered online. The study compares groups at a single point in time and measures no performance, so it cannot say whether confidence or control matter for shooting better.

Some passages do not add up. The normality test on the loneliness scale comes out significant (p = 0.038 and 0.001), yet the text concludes that the data are normal; in the discussion the lowest commitment is given to dance at 8.83, which in the table is the control score. The loneliness averages, between 57 and 67 out of a maximum of 80, are very high for active athletes, and the paper does not comment on this. A 64% correct classification on 25 people, without checking it on a separate group, should be taken as indicative.

For anyone who shoots, the picture is a familiar one: in this group the archers described themselves as confident and steady in their commitment, but less able than the others to feel in charge when things get difficult, which is the part of the questionnaire called control. It is a descriptive profile of 25 archers from one Turkish province, gathered by questionnaire, and it says neither where the difference comes from nor whether it changes anything in the score. In the registry it serves as a comparison between sports on mental toughness, not as guidance for training.