Parents and young archers: Oktafiranda 2023 study

The study describes how far the parents of young archers at a club in East Jakarta, the Focus Archery Center, say they support their children's archery. All 27 parents at the club answered a closed questionnaire of 35 statements on four themes: attention to the child, nutrition, equipment and facilities, and the family and training environment.

Total scores ranged from 74 to 93, with a mean of 85.67 and a standard deviation of 5.12. Split into three bands, 11 parents (40.7%) fell in the high band, 12 (44.4%) in the middle and 4 (14.8%) in the low. Theme by theme the middle band was also the most common: 51.8% for attention, 51.9% for nutrition, 66.7% for equipment and facilities, 48.1% for the environment. The authors conclude that the parents' role at the club is at a medium level.

This is a descriptive survey, with no comparison and no hypothesis to test. The questionnaire, written by the authors and distributed through Google Forms at the club's range on 25 and 26 June 2022, was completed by every parent (total sampling), each on their own phone. The paper gives the grid of questions by theme, but not the response scale, the maximum possible score or any evidence of the instrument's reliability or validity. The bands were set with cut-offs at 80 and 88 points, and the results are reported as counts and percentages, with no inferential statistics.

The study measures no performance at all: there are no scores, competition results or levels for the archers, so the title, which speaks of supporting performance, goes beyond the data. All we have is what the parents report about themselves, on an unvalidated questionnaire, at a single club. The mean score of 85.67 is then presented as a percentage, which does not hold without knowing the maximum of the scale, and the conclusion that the parents' role is "44.4%" confuses the share of parents in the middle band with the amount of support.

There are several inaccuracies as well. The methods refer to 27 athletes instead of 27 parents; the discussion describes the 35 items as questions about motivation; the cut-off for the low band is printed as "≥80" instead of below 80; the low band is 14.8% in the table and 14.4% in the text; the Indonesian summary dates the data collection to June 2022, the English one to May.

For archers and coaches it offers nothing on performance, because it does not measure performance. What remains is a snapshot of how a group of parents at an Indonesian club see their own involvement: most place themselves in the middle, and the theme on which the fewest parents rate themselves highly is equipment and facilities (11.1%), meaning the equipment and venues for training and competing. A club wanting to understand how parents follow their children could at most use the questionnaire as a list of topics to raise; the study does not say what kind of support helps a young archer develop.