Mental toughness in young archers: Shouma 2025

Fifteen adolescent archers from the Paser club in Sidoarjo, Indonesia, took part in a single session of positive-thinking training built on cognitive behaviour modification techniques, and their mean score on a mental toughness scale went from 54.53 to 60.13. The standard deviation rose from 4.34 to 6.20, so after the session the group was more spread out than before and the fifteen did not all move in the same way. The paired-samples t-test reports a significance of 0.0001 and a before-and-after correlation of 0.637.

The authors then cross-tabulated mental toughness against four personal characteristics, and none of the four came out related: sex (0.782), level of education (0.833), age (0.405) and years of practice (0.117). Experience comes closest to the threshold, and the discussion reads it as a tendency worth following up rather than as a finding. For the other three the authors' explanation is that the group was homogeneous: all adolescents, all students, all from the same club.

Shooting scores play no part in the study. There are no arrows, no distances and no target faces: what is measured is only what fifteen young people state on a questionnaire, before and after one session.

The design is a one-group pre-post study with no control group: the same fifteen archers fill in the scale before and after the treatment. The sample is the whole club, and the paper describes it in two ways that do not match, as saturation sampling (everyone is taken because there are fewer than thirty) and as purposive sampling with adolescent age as the selection criterion.

The treatment was given once only. The text calls it positive-thinking training and names its two ingredients: visualisation, meaning picturing success and going through the competition mentally before it happens, and emotional control, meaning recognising emotions and keeping them steady while competing. How long the session lasted, how it was divided, who ran it and with what materials, the paper does not say.

The instrument is a Mental Toughness Scale for which no author, no number of items, no score range and no reliability figure measured on this sample are given. The analysis was run in SPSS: a Shapiro-Wilk test for normality (0.32 before, 0.623 after), a paired-samples t-test for the before-and-after comparison, and chi-square cross-tabulations for the four personal characteristics.

With no control group there is no way to separate the effect of the session from the effect of filling in the same questionnaire a second time, from the expectation of improvement, and from the time that passed between the two administrations, which the paper does not state. There was a single session and no follow-up weeks later.

The roughest point is the scale itself. Without a score range, 54.53 and 60.13 cannot be placed: there is no telling whether they sit halfway up the scale or near the top, nor how many questions there were. The t value for the comparison is never reported; the paper gives the before-and-after correlation (0.637) and the significance, and the discussion confuses the two, calling the figure 0.0001 the significance of the correlation. The two abstracts disagree: the English one gives 0.0001, the Indonesian one gives 0.000 and sets the threshold at p < 0.005 instead of 0.05.

The four cross-tabulations have almost no statistical power: with fifteen people split by sex, age, education and experience, a non-significant result means nothing was found, not that there is nothing to find. The authors themselves flag the small sample and call for larger studies with other designs. Of the shot itself, the study measures nothing.

For someone who shoots, this study says nothing about shooting. It says that a group of adolescents, after one session on positive thinking, ticked higher values on a mental toughness questionnaire. Whether those values change anything on the shooting line was not checked, because nobody in the study shot an arrow.

In the registry it counts as thin evidence on young archers and on psychological interventions: a sign that the question is worth asking, not an answer to it. The part most easily misread is the four cross-tabulations: that sex, age, education and experience came out unrelated to mental toughness in fifteen young people from one club does not license the claim that those things do not matter. And the missing score range rules out even the simplest comparison, the one with another group of archers.