State and trait anxiety in elite archers: Saçakli 2019

The study measured anxiety in 156 archers at the 2018 Turkey Cup using the Turkish version of Spielberger's inventory, which separates state anxiety, how anxious someone is at that moment, from trait anxiety, their usual tendency to be anxious. Mean scores were 60.63 for state anxiety and 40.94 for trait anxiety.

The author compared scores by sex, age, bow type, years of practice and national team membership. According to the paper there are two significant differences: women had higher trait anxiety than men (42.21 against 39.47) and recurve archers higher state anxiety than compound archers (61.05 against 57.63). Age and experience made no difference, and neither did national team status: the 17 national team archers had almost the same means as the other 139 (61.82 against 60.49 for state anxiety, 40.76 against 40.96 for trait anxiety).

Of the 421 archers competing, 156 volunteers filled in a personal information form (sex, age, bow, years of practice, national team membership) and the two inventories, each of 20 items answered on a scale from 1 to 4. The sample was 73.1% male and 70.5% recurve; 55.8% were aged 14 to 24 and almost half, 49.4%, had been shooting for one to three years. Only 10.9% were on the national team.

Groups were compared with independent-samples t tests and, for age and experience, one-way analysis of variance. The paper does not say at what point in the competition the questionnaires were completed, whether before shooting, between stages or at the end.

The title calls the archers elite, but nine in ten were not on the national team and almost half had at most three years of practice: this is a sample of entrants at a national competition. When the questionnaires were filled in is not stated, and for state anxiety that is decisive, because the same person gives different scores before shooting and after the event.

The two significant differences do not survive a check against the published numbers. For trait anxiety between women and men the table reports t = 1.071 with p = 0.028, two values that cannot go together; recalculating from the means and standard deviations in the table gives p of about 0.09, so no difference. For bow type the table reports t = -0.828 with p = 0.009; recalculation gives p of about 0.05, a borderline difference of just over three points. Other details point to careless preparation: the minimum and maximum values in the descriptive table are on a 1 to 4 scale while the means are on the 20 to 80 scale, and some F values are printed without the decimal point. The conclusions about selecting athletes and equipment do not come from the study's data.

The study gives an idea of the anxiety levels found at a national competition, with mean state anxiety of about 61 on a 20 to 80 scale, but without knowing when the scores were collected they cannot be read as the anxiety of someone about to shoot. There is no measure of performance, so the study says nothing about how anxiety relates to score.

The most interesting finding is what does not change: national team archers and those with more years of practice reported no different anxiety from the rest, which suggests that experience alone does not lower the anxiety archers report at a competition. This too is a weak indication, since there were only 17 national team archers. The difference between recurve and compound, which the author attributes to the ergonomics of the bows, is small, statistically fragile and has no tested explanation.