Nomophobia and archery accuracy: Suhasto 2023

Thirty club archers from the Banyumas regency in Central Java filled in a questionnaire on nomophobia, the anxiety of being separated from one's mobile phone, and were split into two groups of fifteen: the fifteen with the highest scores and the fifteen with the lowest. They then shot 36 arrows at 40 metres.

The low-nomophobia group averaged 188.40 points and the high-nomophobia group 168.07, a difference of 20.33 points (t = 4.861 against a critical value of 2.048 at 28 degrees of freedom, p < 0.001). These are modest scores in absolute terms: out of 360 available, they work out at about 5.2 and 4.7 points per arrow.

The authors also report the distribution across score bands of their own making: in the high-nomophobia group thirteen of the fifteen archers fall in the 90 to 179 band and two in the 180 to 269 band; in the low-nomophobia group the proportions reverse, with eleven archers in the upper band and four in the lower. None of the thirty exceeds 270 points. The explanation offered is that dependence on a smartphone makes concentration harder, and that in the thirty seconds in front of the target that difficulty is paid for.

The study is descriptive and comparative, collected with a questionnaire in April and May 2021, at a club affiliated to the Indonesian federation in the Banyumas regency. All thirty archers were taken, with no selection, and they are at once the study's population and its sample. The split into two groups is made afterwards, by ranking the thirty on their questionnaire score and cutting at the middle.

The questionnaire is closed-ended, with 22 items across four aspects: being unable to communicate, losing connectivity, being unable to access information, and giving up convenience. The authors report a single figure of 0.845 for validity and reliability, without distinguishing the two, and do not report the scores obtained by either group, nor the cut-off separating high from low.

The performance measure is a 36-arrow test at 40 metres, for which the authors cite a validity of 0.895 and a reliability of 0.944 taken from earlier work, with the score being the sum of the arrow values. The analysis consists of a normality check with Kolmogorov-Smirnov, a homogeneity check with Levene's test and an independent samples t-test, all at the five per cent level.

Nothing is known about the thirty archers: not their ages, sexes, years of practice, bow type or the level they had reached. The test conditions are not described either, and the test took place on a single occasion.

The two groups are not two clinical categories: they are the two halves of the same club, ranked on a questionnaire score. High nomophobia here means only being in the upper half of thirty people, and how far apart the two halves are is not stated, because the questionnaire scores never appear.

The design is cross-sectional and measures everything on the same day, so the direction of the link remains open: weaker archers may spend more time on their phones, not only the other way round. There is no adjustment for age, years of practice, bow type or training volume, because none of those data were collected. With mean scores of 168 and 188 out of 360 these are archers in their first seasons, where a difference in experience between two groups of fifteen can be worth far more than twenty points.

The performance measure is a single 36-arrow test outdoors, with no note of wind or conditions, and the score bands into which the authors sort the archers are of their own making rather than standard. The authors list among their limitations the pandemic then under way, the fact that they did not supervise the testing in person, and the archers' limited familiarity with the idea of nomophobia.

The piece of reasoning that holds the paper together, that playing on a phone and shooting a bow engage the same processes in the brain, is asserted with citations to other work and is not measured here in any way. The journal is a Polish physiotherapy title, remote from the subject, and it is among those the registry flags for questionable editorial standards: the result should be read with caution.

For an archer, the cautious reading is this: at one Indonesian club, the fifteen archers who reported more anxiety about being without their phone scored twenty points less over 36 arrows than the fifteen who reported less. It is an association measured once, in a group of beginners whose ages and experience are unknown, and it does not show that leaving a phone in the kit bag gains points.

What cannot be concluded matters as much as what the title says. Nobody tried taking phones away from one group and leaving them with the other, so the effect of changing the habit lies outside the study. And with two groups split down the middle of a single club, the difference in score may say more about how much the two groups trained than about how much they looked at a screen.

In the registry this source is a trace of a subject that circulates widely in sporting circles and has barely been studied in archers: digital distraction. It serves to mark the gap rather than to settle anything.