Crystal Smit

Evaluation of the Motivation Process 5 119 Table 5.3 Correlations between the change variables and peers’ demographics Sex Grade level Family affluence Changes in peers’ intrinsic motivation .07 .22* -.17 Changes in peers’ social support -.26* .19† .17 Changes in peers’ injunctive norms -.08 .26* .17 Changes in peers’ descriptive norms -.07 .08 -.12 Note. † p < .10, * p < .05, ** p < .01. p = .034) and injunctive norm ( r = .19, p = .078), and a marginal significant positive relation between grade level and changes in social support ( r = .26, p = .011). This indicates that children in higher grades had a greater change in intrinsic motivation, injunctive norm, and social support. There was no significant relation for family affluence. DISCUSSION This study is the first to investigate the process of motivating influence agents to diffuse the target behavior among their peers when implementing a social network intervention, in particular, whether and how applying self-determination theory-based techniques can motivate influence agents and, indirectly, their peers. Diving deeper into this motivational approach and its application in social network interventions provides insights that are valuable for both future research and interventions. The findings of this study are discussed below following the three research aims. General Experiences with the Training In general, the findings showed that the influence agents had enjoyed the Share H 2 O training, found the duration adequate, and experienced it as autonomy supportive. The latter is highly important because an approach is only truly autonomy supportive if the intended individuals actually experience it this manner and not when the trainers alone think they were autonomy supportive. Previous work has shown that, for example, parents tend to overestimate how autonomy supportive they are towards their children (Cheung, Pomerantz, Wang, & Qu, 2016). Our findings suggest that a social network intervention based on the