Coach and archers communication: Oktafiranda 2020

In August 2020 the 20 archers at the Jakarta regional training centre, who were preparing for the Indonesian National Games (PON XX), completed an online questionnaire at home about communication with their coaches. The mean score was 136.3, or 73.65% of the maximum, with values from 125 to 148 (median 139, standard deviation 7.283). Across all answers, 14.32% were "strongly agree", 57.57% "agree", 15.41% undecided, 7.43% "disagree" and 5.27% "strongly disagree".

The questionnaire has five dimensions: openness, empathy, support, positivity and equality. In every one "agree" was the most common answer, from 52.86% for openness to 65.00% for positivity. The authors conclude that communication between the centre's coaches and archers is effective.

This is a descriptive survey of all the archers at the centre, with no comparisons and no hypothesis to test. The questionnaire, on Google Forms, had five response levels from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree". The total of 740 answers implies 37 items (seven on openness, seven on empathy, ten on support, six on positivity and seven on equality), for a theoretical maximum of 185 points. The five dimensions come from an Indonesian textbook on interpersonal communication. The analysis is limited to means, frequencies and percentages.

The paper does not say who wrote the items, whether the questionnaire was piloted or validated, or whether the answers were anonymous, which matters when athletes selected for a competition are rating their own coaches. It does not describe the archers (sex, age, bow division, level) or say how many coaches there were. Nor does it explain why 73.65% should count as effective communication.

In three dimensions the text and the tables disagree: for empathy the text gives 50% "strongly agree" and the table 12.14%; for support the text gives 50% and 20% for the first two answers and the table 19.50% and 54.00%; for equality the text gives 35.71% and 28.57% and the table 9.29% and 62.86%. This record uses the tables. No link with shooting scores was examined.

The study is a snapshot of a single group at a particular moment, in August 2020 with the questionnaire filled in at home, and it does not say whether better communication leads to better shooting. For coaches the most useful part is the five-dimension framework with examples taken from archery, such as the coach who signals where the arrow landed with a gesture when speaking is not possible: it is a way of thinking about how one communicates, not a measured result. Without anything to compare them with, the questionnaire figures cannot say whether communication in Jakarta was better or worse than anywhere else.