Anti-doping and archery coaches: Kuswahyudi 2020

The study measures how much archery coaches in Jakarta know about anti-doping. All 71 coaches and assistant coaches at the province's clubs filled in a closed questionnaire made up of statements to answer yes or no. Scores ranged from 12 to 29, with a mean of 19.59, a median of 20 and a standard deviation of 4.36. Split into three bands, 28 coaches (39.43%) fell into the "poor" band, from 12 to 18 points, 40 (56.34%) into the "fair" band, from 19 to 25, and only 3 (4.23%) into the "good" band, from 26 to 32. The authors conclude that the province's coaches need education on anti-doping.

It is a descriptive survey carried out in January at Universitas Negeri Jakarta; the year is not given. The sample is the whole population: every coach and assistant coach at the clubs in Jakarta, 71 people. The questionnaire uses a Guttman scale: each statement is answered yes or no, scoring one point for yes and zero for no, with the scoring reversed for negatively worded statements. According to the authors, the answers were also checked through interviews, about which nothing more is said. The three bands are seven points wide and start from the lowest score obtained: they appear to be built on the data, not on thresholds set in advance. The introduction summarises the World Anti-Doping Code, the classes of prohibited substances, the sample collection procedure and the side effects of the main substances, which suggests the topics the questionnaire covered.

The paper does not include the questionnaire, the number of items or the maximum possible score, so a mean of 19.59 cannot be turned into a percentage of correct answers. The bands are relative to the group and say nothing about what a coach needs to know to count as "good". Nor do we learn which topics the coaches did worst on, which is the information a federation would find most useful. There are no data on the coaches' age, experience or qualifications, and the questionnaire's validity is not described. In the descriptive table the highest and lowest scores are swapped (12 listed as the maximum and 29 as the minimum). The finding concerns a single Indonesian province at one point in time.

For archers the study changes nothing technical, but it is a concrete reminder: across an entire group of club coaches, fewer than one in twenty showed good knowledge of anti-doping. In that setting, checking a medicine or a supplement falls in practice to the athlete, who under the World Code is personally responsible in any case. For a federation it is a sign that coaches' grounding in this subject cannot be taken for granted, even though the figure comes from Jakarta and from a questionnaire we have not seen.