An Exploratory Study of Personality Traits and Psychological Coping Skills on Archery Performance

Abstract

It is essential for coaches to understand the uniqueness of psychological elements and personality traits factors amongst athletes’ in order to optimise transmission of messages for efficient performance. The present study intends to explore the personality traits and psychological coping skills with their association to archery performance. A total of 32 archers drawn from different archery programmes participated in the study. The revised version of Eysenck personality, as well as psychological coping skills inventory, were used to determine the extroversion, neuroticism traits and psychological coping skills of the archers prior to their archery shooting tests. Discriminants analysis discriminate three variables from the eight with an acceptable Canonical correlation of 0.70 and excellent accuracy of 77.42%, 80.65%, and 83.87% respectively. Moreover, a follow up test from independent t-test reveals no statistically significant difference between the personality traits and archers’ ability of coping with adversity, coachability, concentration, confidence & achievement motivation, goal setting and mental preparation, peaking under pressure, freedom from worry, as well as their archery shooting scores p > 0.05. The findings from the present study indicated that both personality traits of extroversion and neuroticism possessed considerable psychological coping skills, therefore both could be suitable for performing sport of archery.