Matteo Campagna
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Archers who set themselves more precise goals also report more drive to achieve

1 study · 21 archers measured

No usable study yet says whether archers who set themselves more precise goals are also more driven. The only one that tries, on twenty-one archers in one Indonesian city, sets two questionnaires side by side: one on how the archer sets goals (specificity, relevance, difficulty, commitment, participation and feedback) and one on achievement motivation. The reported correlation is 0.996, close to a straight line, and two different questionnaires cannot produce that value: with the reliabilities the authors themselves report, 0.903 and 0.892, the ceiling on the observable correlation is about 0.90. Either the two scales measure the same thing, in which case the link is a foregone conclusion, or there is an error in the calculations, in which case the figure says nothing. Either way the study does not answer the question, which remains open.

Also phrased as: "goal setting"; "specific, measurable goals in archery"; "setting targets"; "goals and motivation"; "having something to aim for"

In practice

Archers are advised to set precise goals, a score or a group size to reach by a given date, because a clear target is thought to keep the will to train high.

Evidence

  • 2023
    Context Archers Published later

    21 registered archers from the city of Pontianak (11 men and 10 women) complete a goal-setting scale (specificity, relevance, difficulty, commitment, participation and feedback) and an achievement motivation scale: Pearson r = 0.996, p < 0.001, which the authors read as a 99.2 per cent contribution. The two scales' stated reliabilities, 0.903 and 0.892, put the ceiling on the observable correlation at around 0.90. A value above the ceiling means overlapping scales or a calculation error: the finding cannot be used as evidence and stays as context.

    Goal Setting dan Motivasi Berprestasi Atlet Panahan di Kota Pontianak · Maulidi Yogi Fachrezi, Vidyastuti Vidyastuti, Widya Lestari

Status history

  1. 1990 Not studied In the registry's bibliography nobody had yet measured, in archers, the way they set goals alongside the motivation they report.
  2. 2023 Not studied The first and only study arrives: twenty-one archers from Pontianak, in Indonesia, with one questionnaire on goals and one on achievement motivation, correlated at 0.996. With the reliabilities the two scales report, 0.903 and 0.892, a correlation this high is not possible between two different measures: either the scales overlap or there is an error in the calculations, and in neither case does the figure say how far goals and motivation go together. The question remains unstudied.
Cite
APA

Campagna, M. (2026). Archers who set themselves more precise goals also report more drive to achieve (Version 2). In Evidence Registry. Retrieved 16 October 2026, from https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/mind/precise-goals-motivation-archers

BibTeX
@misc{campagna2026_obiettiviprecisimotivazione,
  author = {Campagna, Matteo},
  title = {Archers who set themselves more precise goals also report more drive to achieve},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {Evidence Registry, matteocampagna.com},
  url = {https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/mind/precise-goals-motivation-archers},
  note = {Version 2; accessed 2026-10-16}
}

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