The purpose of this study was to develop and validate social achievement goal orientation for infants. In order to accomplish the aim of the study, two research questions were made.

First, what about the validity of the social achievement goal orientation scale for infant?
Second, what about the reliability of the social achievement goal orientation scale for infant?

To address the research questions, subjects are 261 infants with 126 boys and 135 girls. 2x2 social achievement goal orientation was developed by the stage of preliminary items development, preliminary scene drawing, revision of items and scenes, and final scene composition. In the study, social achievement goal orientation for infants was coded 1 if their responses were same with the picture and 0 if their responses were not same with the picture presented to them.

The results of this study are as follows :

First, after factor analysis social achievement goal orientation, social mastery avoidance and social performance avoidance emerged as one factor, so the final social achievement goal orientation had 3 factors which were social mastery, social performance, and social avoidance.

Second, as the result of exploratory factor analysis, final 32 items were selected as follows: 8 items of social mastery goal orientation, 8 items of social performance goal orientation, and 16 items of social avoidance goal orientation.

Third, though the social achievement goal orientation were dichotomous data, the internal consistency reliability showed a higher result over .70.

The significances of this study were as follows:

First, previous researches on social achievement goal orientation studied adolescents or college students, however, the study attempted to expand the theories of it by developing its scale to understand the motives of infants.

Second, given the various studies on cognitions, motives, emotions, adaptations, and so on, the study expended social achievement goal orientation to young children.

Third, social achievement goal orientation (social mastery approach, social mastery avoidance, social performance approach) had predictive validity with social ability and emotion regulation.