Left-handed female archers and scores: Gursoy 2017

The study compared hand dominance and score in 44 Turkish women compound archers competing at the national senior women's championship. A ten-question survey on which hand they used in daily life classed 5 as left-handed and 39 as right-handed. The score is the competition score: two rounds of 36 arrows at 50 metres, out of a possible 720.

The five left-handers averaged 670.60 points (standard deviation 14.12) and the right-handers 561.72 (99.63). For the individual rounds the reported means are 334.80 against 227.90 in the first and 335.80 against 283.33 in the second, with differences the tests describe as significant (p between 0.015 and 0.035). The authors conclude that laterality may be among the most important factors in archery success, that left-handed women have an edge in selection, and that left-handers should not be made to use their right hand.

The archers had a mean age of 22.84 and 5.34 years of shooting. Hand dominance was assessed with the short form of the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory: for each activity (writing, drawing, throwing, using scissors, brushing teeth, striking a match and so on) a score from +10 to -10 is given depending on which hand is used, and the total gives a laterality index. Eye dominance was assessed with a keyhole test, but its results do not appear in the paper. The score comes from a competition under international rules, with six-arrow ends; left- and right-handers were compared with an independent-samples t-test and a correlation.

Five left-handers are too few to speak of an advantage: two or three of the strongest archers at the championship among them would be enough to lift the group mean, and the study does not say who they were or what level they shot at. The numbers also fail to add up in several places. The right-handers' first-round mean (227.90) cannot be reconciled with the mean for all 44 archers (284.36): with those values it would be about 240, whereas 277.90 would make the sums work, so a misprint is likely. The text gives the top score in the second round as 155 and the table as 351; the correlation reported for the first round is -3.64, an impossible value for a correlation coefficient; and the p value for the total score (0.020) does not match the reported t.

It is not even clear which hand the left-handers shot with: one passage says they held the bow in the right hand, another in the left. The survey measures the preferred hand in daily life, not the shooting side or the aiming eye, and a comparison between such unequal groups cannot show that laterality determines score. The journal is flagged in the registry as a venue with questionable editorial standards.

For compound archers, and for anyone selecting athletes, the study gives no grounds for preferring left-handers. It shows that at a Turkish national championship five left-handed women had high scores that were very close together, but with so small a group, contradictory figures and no allowance for experience or level, the result may simply reflect who those five athletes were.

The authors' recommendation to favour left-handers in selection goes beyond what the data can support. What remains, as the authors' opinion rather than a finding of the study, is the view that a left-hander should not be forced to shoot right-handed.