Plywood bows for beginner archers: Muzakki 2022 study

Seventy students at Universitas Muhammadiyah Malang, beginners who had signed up for archery as an extracurricular activity, took three weeks of lessons with plywood and PVC training bows and filled in two questionnaires before and after, one on mood and one on self-confidence. According to the descriptive table, mood rose from 49.00 to 53.63 and confidence from 48.00 to 53.47; the paired t test gives t = 9.879 for mood and t = 10.664 for confidence, and the authors conclude that the lessons improved both.

In the results table, however, the same comparisons appear with completely different means: mood goes from 4.62 to 5.40 and confidence from 5.47 to 6.20, with standard deviations of about 4 points. The paper does not explain which of the two sets of numbers describes the data, or on what scale they are expressed.

The study has a single group, measured before and after, with no control. There were three lessons a week, on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays from 8 to 9 in the morning, nine sessions of 60 minutes in all, under the COVID-19 precautions of the time. They taught the shot sequence in seven stages (stance, nocking, bow hold, set-up with the eyes on the target, draw, anchor, aim and release), and to keep interest up anyone who hit the target received a prize. The paper does not describe the bow (draw weight, length), the arrows or the shooting distance.

Mood was measured with the Mood States Questionnaire, five items on positive and negative feelings answered from 1 to 5; confidence with a 19-item questionnaire taken from an Indonesian study and extended by the authors to 20, again from 1 to 5. A validity and a reliability value are given for each (0.64 and 0.70 for mood, 0.88 and 0.79 for confidence). The questionnaires took 40 minutes to complete and were reviewed by three sport psychology experts; the analysis is a paired t test.

The numbers do not hold together. The mood questionnaire has five items scored 1 to 5, so the total runs from 5 to 25, yet the descriptive table reports means of 49 and 53; the second table gives values around 5 for both scales, without saying whether they are item means; with t = 9.879 and 70 participants the p value should be far smaller than the 0.005 reported; and height in the participants' table is given as 1.61 centimetres. The test of homogeneity of variance between before and after, presented among the results, has no clear purpose in a single-group design either.

Leaving these problems aside, without a control group the change cannot be put down to archery: over three weeks mood and confidence can rise through novelty, through enjoying being in a group, through getting back to in-person activities during the pandemic, or because the students knew what was expected of them. The confidence questionnaire was modified by the authors with no new validation described. None of the measures concerns shooting.

The study looks at archery as a recreational activity for university students and says nothing about performance. The starting idea is sensible: a cheap plywood and PVC bow lets a lot of beginners try shooting, and the lessons are described simply. But the data, as published, do not allow anyone to say how much mood and confidence changed, or to attribute the change to the lessons.

For anyone running beginners' courses the takeaway is modest: after nine archery lessons with a small prize game, the students reported higher mood and confidence than before. In the registry the study counts as an example of research on archery as an educational activity, with data to be read very cautiously.