Coordination and anxiety in U12 archers: Arifin 2022

In 37 under-12 archers from five clubs in West Jakarta, the study measures eye-hand coordination, kinaesthetic perception (the sense of the body's position and movement), competitive anxiety and the score on a shooting test, and uses path analysis to reconstruct how these variables influence one another. According to the model, score depends directly on coordination (coefficient 0.259, 6.7% of the variance), on kinaesthetic perception (0.130, 1.69%) and above all on anxiety (0.398, about 15.8%).

Coordination and kinaesthetic perception in turn would together explain 88.6% of anxiety (coefficients 0.663 and 0.669) and, through anxiety, would have a larger indirect effect on score than their direct one. The full model explains 97.1% of the variance in score, and coordination alone would explain 86.8% of kinaesthetic perception.

The data were collected between May and June 2021. Of the 60 archers active in the five clubs, the authors chose 37 by purposive sampling without stating the criteria. Coordination was measured with a test of throwing and catching a ball against a wall divided into boxes with different scores; kinaesthetic perception with a test the paper names but does not describe; anxiety with the Indonesian version of the Sport Anxiety Scale, a questionnaire; score with a shooting test on a target face, for which distance, number of arrows and bow type are not given.

Path analysis is a chain of regressions: a causal order is fixed in advance (coordination and perception first, then anxiety, score last) and a coefficient is estimated for each link in the model. The percentages in the paper are the squares of these coefficients.

The design is cross-sectional: all the measures were taken in the same period, so the causal order in the model is the authors' assumption, not a finding. That better coordination should increase anxiety, as the positive coefficients say, is hard to interpret, and the paper does not explain whether a high score on the scale means more or less anxiety: without that, we cannot even tell which way the effect of anxiety on score runs. Exact ages, sex, experience, bow type and the means of the variables are missing.

The figures are not consistent with one another. The direct effect of anxiety is 15.8% in the conclusions and 15.28% in the discussion; the coefficient for kinaesthetic perception is 0.130 in one place and 0.169 in another; the indirect effects are 27.35% and 18.9% in the discussion but 26.4% and 26.6% in the conclusions; in the first model R squared is 0.868, but the error term is calculated from 0.931. With 37 children, an R squared of 0.971 for a shooting score is far higher than one would expect, and points to a model fitted too closely to the data or to measures that overlap.

For anyone coaching young children the underlying idea is reasonable: coordination, a sense of movement and handling anxiety matter in shooting, and children differ widely from one another. This study, however, does not tell us how much they matter. The reported percentages depend on a model imposed on the data, on tests that are partly undescribed and on calculations that do not agree from one section to the next, so they are no basis for deciding what to work on.

What remains is a general indication: in a group of under-12s, those who were better coordinated and had a better sense of body position tended to score more. It does not follow that training ball catching improves shooting, or that children's anxiety depends on their coordination. In the registry the study counts as weak evidence on the youngest archers.