Motivation of young archers: Wattimena 2021 study

The study measures the motivation of the 45 young people in the archery club of an Islamic middle school in Bekasi, Indonesia (SMP Islam Al-Azhar 8 Kemang Pratama). The club trained once a week, on Wednesdays, for about 90 minutes on the school field; a teacher had reported poor attendance. On 8 January 2021 the pupils filled in a Google Form questionnaire of 45 statements with five levels of agreement, split into three dimensions: the drive to act, feelings about the activity and goals.

On the total score 4 pupils fall in the very high band (8.9%), 10 in the high band (22.2%), 19 in the middle band (42.2%), 9 in the low band (20%) and 3 in the very low band (6.7%). On the goals dimension there are more pupils in the two lower bands (15) than in the two upper ones (13). The authors conclude that motivation is moderate, and relatively high because the upper bands hold more pupils than the lower ones.

This is a descriptive survey of every member of the club. The bands are not fixed thresholds but depend on the sample itself: the mean plus or minus half a standard deviation for the middle band, plus or minus one and a half standard deviations for the outer ones. The band limits imply a mean of about 170 points, on a possible range of 45 to 225, with a standard deviation of about 17.5. The questionnaire was written by the authors with reference to a research methods textbook; neither the number of statements per dimension nor any check of validity or reliability is reported.

With bands built on the group's own mean and standard deviation, most pupils end up in the middle by construction and the tails balance out. Saying that motivation is relatively high because the upper bands hold 14 pupils and the lower ones 12 reads the shape of the distribution, not its level: the same result would come out of a poorly motivated group. The only absolute figure, a mean of around 170 out of 225, is not discussed by the authors.

The questionnaire is not validated, it was filled in online at the height of the pandemic, and the paper does not say whether the club was training in those months. The pupils' age, sex and experience are missing. Attendance at training, which was the starting problem, was not measured, and no data concern shooting.

For an archer the study changes nothing. For anyone running a school club it is a description: young people who train ninety minutes a week answer, on average, on the agreeing side, just below "agree" for each statement. The authors read the goals dimension as relatively low, but this too needs caution: the bands are calculated on the group and on each dimension, so they only show how the pupils are spread among themselves, not how motivated they are in absolute terms, and they do not allow one dimension to be compared with another.