Imagery and goal orientation in archers: Şentürk 2023

The study asks whether archers who make more use of mental imagery are also more task-oriented or ego-oriented, the two ways of defining success in achievement goal theory: improving on oneself or doing better than others. The respondents were 251 Turkish archers aged 17 to 20, surveyed at national competitions in 2019 and 2020.

All five types of imagery measured by the questionnaire are positively associated with both orientations, but the links are weak. With task orientation the Spearman coefficients range from 0.140 (arousal-related imagery) to 0.336 (cognitive general imagery, which covers strategies); with ego orientation they range from 0.156 to 0.282, and this time the highest value is the one for arousal. The women come out as more task-oriented than the men, while the men report more cognitive imagery, both of the movement and of strategy (mean rank 139.16 against 110.69); there are no sex differences on the motivational types. The English title speaks of target orientation, but the Turkish hedef yönelimi here means goal orientation: the target face has nothing to do with it.

The design is cross-sectional and correlational: a single questionnaire session, at competitions, with no intervention. The archers were members of the Turkish federation; according to the participant table 61% shot recurve and 39% compound, 45% had one to three years of experience and 41.4% four to six, and only 10% had been selected for the national team. Incomplete or carelessly completed questionnaires were discarded, but the paper does not say how many.

Imagery is measured with the Turkish version of the Sport Imagery Questionnaire, 30 items on a seven-point scale, which distinguishes five uses: cognitive specific (the movement), cognitive general (strategies and competition plans), motivational specific (goals), motivational general arousal (emotions and tension) and motivational general mastery (feeling in control). Orientation is measured with the Turkish version of the Task and Ego Orientation in Sport Questionnaire, 13 items on a five-point scale. Since the data were not normally distributed, the authors used Spearman correlations and, for group comparisons, Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests.

The title speaks of an effect of imagery, but a cross-sectional study can only measure associations: it cannot say whether using more imagery makes archers more task-oriented, whether the reverse happens, or whether both depend on something else, such as experience or level. The correlations, between 0.14 and 0.34, account for at most a little over 10% of the variance, and with 251 people even links this small come out as significant. The sample, which the authors call random, is in practice made up of volunteers approached at competitions.

Some figures do not add up. The abstract and the method give 116 men and 135 women, the participant table the opposite (116 girls and 135 boys). In the correlation table mastery imagery shows exactly the same values as motivational specific imagery (0.320 and 0.168), which suggests a copying error. The tables on sex differences are images with no readable figures, and the text describes a non-significant difference as a medium effect. The work comes from a thesis and announces comparisons by age, years of practice and national team selection that it never reports. There is no measure of shooting.

For anyone who shoots the study changes little. It shows that among young Turkish archers, those who use more imagery tend to describe themselves as slightly more motivated both by personal improvement and by comparison with others, with weak links. It does not show that training imagery changes motivation, or that either of the two brings more points, because score was not measured.

For a coach the map of the five uses of imagery remains useful: rehearsing the movement, going over the competition plan, calling up the goal, regulating tension and feeling in control are different things, and an archer may use some and neglect others. The differences between boys and girls should be read with caution, given that the paper itself is inconsistent about how many of each there were.