What Are the Social Values of College Students?: A Social Goals Approach

Abstract

The present article investigates conceptualizations of social motivations and social goals. These conceptualizations are brought together toward an integrated taxonomy of social goals, and concurrently an integrated measurement instrument. Goal statements were administered to 571 college students, and dimensionality was assessed using factor analysis of the responses. Seven internally consistent dimensions were identified, interpreted, and labeled. The goal categories are social responsibility and concern, social attractiveness, power, intimacy and interpersonal play, belongingness, receiving assistance, and giving advice.

The influence of anonymous peers on prosocial behavior

“…In the online pre-questionnaire, social concern goals were measured because the prosocial behavior that is the focus of the current study stems from the value of social concern. The original scale was “social responsibility and concern goal” (McCollum, 2009) [ 51 ], and the Korean version was adopted from Shin and colleagues [ 52 ]. Four items were used, including “I consider it important to be considerate of others” and “I want to promote stability in the groups to which I belong.” The Cronbach’s α of the measure was .80.…”

Social Reward Questionnaire (SRQ): development and validation

“…As a starting point for item generation, theoretical and empirical literature discussing social reward and related constructs (e.g., social goals) were reviewed. The following conceptualizations and instruments were reviewed to identify a wide range of potential social rewards: Buss's ( 1983 ) theoretical taxonomy of social rewards, the Interpersonal Goal Inventory (Dryer and Horowitz, 1997 ), the resource theory of social exchange (Foa and Foa, 1980 , 2012 ), approach and avoidance social motives and goals (Gable, 2006 ), social subscales of the Aspiration Index (Grouzet et al, 2005 ), the Interpersonal Orientation Scale (Hill, 1987 ), an adolescent Social Goals Questionnaire (Jarvinen and Nicholls, 1996 ), the Circumplex Scales of Interpersonal Values (Locke, 2000 ), McCollum's ( 2009 ) conceptualization of social goals, a taxonomy of children's social goals (Melnick and Hinshaw, 1996 ), the Short Sadistic Impulse Scale (O'Meara et al, 2011 ) and social items from the Snaith-Hamilton Pleasure Scale (Snaith et al, 1995 ).…”

“…Empirically-driven categorizations of social goals may provide useful clues to the structure of social reward. Social goals can be defined as cognitive representations of desired social outcomes (McCollum, 2009 ) and one factor analysis study resulted in a seven-factor structure of social goals defined as follows: social responsibility and concern; social attractiveness; power; intimacy and interpersonal play; receiving assistance; belongingness; and giving (McCollum, 2009 ). Other studies have defined social goals in terms of the interpersonal circumplex (dominance, submissiveness, warmth, and hostility; Hill, 1987 ; Dryer and Horowitz, 1997 ), compared approach and avoidance goals (Gable, 2006 ) or based categorizations on video-taped observation of social interactions (Melnick and Hinshaw, 1996 ).…”

Systematic Reviews in Educational Research

“…As the dates of the reviews range from 1995 to 2017, we assumed that they would encompass a range of approaches and specific social goals. We acknowledge that this is by no means extensive and other conceptualizations of goals exist (e.g., Chulef et al 2001;Ford 1992;McCollum 2005). Nonetheless our search can be deemed both systematic and comprehensive, and resulted in 42 keywords for the term social goals.…”