During adolescence, peer approval and friendship intimacy become more important and the adolescent has to find a new place in a new social environment. Peers play an important role in the transition and adjustment into a new school (Pratt & George, 2005). Social goals represent the desired social outcomes an adolescent prefers either to achieve or to avoid in terms of their involvement with others (Jarvinen & Nicholls, 1996); they can be preferences to join in with others or to stay alone. These adolescent goals may also have impacts on their later social adjustment (Ryan & Shim, 2008).

Social goals have been characterized along two interpersonal dimensions: agency vs. submission and communality vs. separation. Agencyinvolves independence, authority, dominance, and appearing confident, whereassubmissive goalsrepresent a tendency to avoid difficult situations by conforming to others’ expectations. On the second dimension, communalitymeans intimacy and relational needs and separation represents concealing thoughts and emotions and keeping one’s distance from others. According to the interpersonal circumplex modelindividuals can have different combinations of these goals (e.g. Ojanen, Grönroos, & Salmivalli 2005; Locke 2000, 2003; Kiesler 1983; Wiggins 1979).

Earlier studies have shown that for preadolescents connectedness to peers and communal goals are more important than agentic goals. Boys seek agency such as status and power more than girls, who aspire instead to communality, intimacy, and prosocial goals (Rose & Rudolph 2006; Ojanen et al. 2005). Separation or avoidance goals have been shown to be associated with maladjustment, loneliness, and depression (Kuroda & Sakurai 2010; Mouratidis & Sideridis 2009) and communal goals with popularity and status among peers. There is also evidence that children’s agentic goals tend to increase more than their communal goals (Ojanen et al. 2005). It is plausible that social goals change during major life transitions that feature individual and contextual changes, such as adolescence with its major cognitive, emotional, and social changes occurring simultaneously with the educational transition from elementary to lower secondary school (Zirkel 1992; Urdan & Maehr 1995).

Both adults’ (e.g. Locke 2000, 2003) and children’s (Ojanen et al. 2005) social goals have been measured previously on the basis of combinations of agentic and separate goals. These instruments consist of eight categories (agentic, submissive, communal, separate, agentic and communal, agentic and separate, submissive and communal, submissive and separate) that provide measures of agentic and communal vector scores. Employing these instruments allows a given individual's social goals to be illustrated according to the division of social goals into the two basic dimensions of agency and communality. Besides these typological dimensions, we began to examine whether goals could be measured as individual aspects and whether they change over time. There has been scant research to date about the potential changes in adolescents’ social goals during school transition and the subsequent years in lower secondary school.

In this study we first tested a model to see whether social goals could be measured in terms of four separate factors. We analysed the construct validity and internal reliability of the scale. Secondly, we examined the longitudinal stability of each resultant factor based on confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Thirdly, we aimed to study the gender and time effects on social goals during lower secondary school using six measurement points.

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