Wheelchair athletes and archery: Yulianto 2025

Forty-eight Indonesian wheelchair student-athletes, 12 from each of four sports (tennis, archery, athletics and fencing), answered a questionnaire of 15 statements, each scored from 1 to 4, on four themes: improved quality of life, social integration, sense of existence (having a purpose, feeling recognised) and barriers to taking part. They were on average 17.7 years old, with 4.3 years of training and 2.1 years of competing; 13 had competed nationally and 35 regionally.

The archers scored on average 13.92 out of 16 for quality of life, 13.83 for social integration (the highest of the four sports), 13.83 for sense of existence and 7.33 out of 12 for barriers. The differences between sports were small, and a single Kruskal-Wallis test on the whole questionnaire found none that was significant (H = 2.790, p = 0.425). In interviews the archers described close contact with other athletes, which the authors use to explain the social integration score.

The questionnaire was built by the authors after a literature review and a discussion with lecturers in sport psychology and disability sport; five experts rated the items, all with an Aiken's V above 0.7. Three themes have four statements each (scores from 4 to 16), barriers has three (from 3 to 12), and a high barriers score means more obstacles perceived.

Data were collected between June 2024 and January 2025, two or three days before several competitions, with the coaches' permission; unstructured interviews were held during the same period. The paper reports means, standard deviations and the Kruskal-Wallis test. Sex, type of impairment and bow type are not described.

The title speaks of a phenomenological study, but the work is a descriptive survey: the interviews have no stated method of analysis and appear only as explanations in the discussion. With 12 people per sport, a short questionnaire and answers close to the top of the scale, the differences between sports are too small to mean anything, and the only test compares the total score rather than the four themes.

There are also inconsistencies between text and tables: for sense of existence the table gives tennis 14.58, above the archers, while the text names archery as highest; and the abstract says tennis and fencing had the lowest barriers, while in the table tennis has the highest value. A mean age of 17.7 years with a standard deviation of 8.1 suggests a very mixed group for students. Finally, answering a few days before a competition, with the coach's permission, may push responses towards the positive.

For archers, the study shows that in this group wheelchair student-athletes who do archery describe the sport as a positive experience for their social life and self-confidence, just as those in tennis, athletics or fencing do. It does not show that archery does better than the other sports, because the differences are not significant, and it measures nothing about the shooting itself.

The authors' reading, that an individual sport like archery can still build bonds through group training and competitions, comes from the interviews and remains an interpretation. For a club that welcomes wheelchair athletes, the most concrete finding concerns barriers: poorly accessible facilities, little financial support and discrimination appear in all four sports, with mean scores between 6.75 and 7.50 out of 12, around the middle of the scale.