Crystal Smit

Chapter 6 132 Another interesting avenue for further research is to disentangle the effect of the training itself, which focuses on enhancing intrinsic motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000), from the effect of deploying influence agents. The question is whether the effect of influence agents is crucial or whether the content of the autonomy-supportive training itself is already motivating children to drink more water. It could be that targeting the entire class with the training and allowing children to encourage and support each other to drink water could be fruitful, perhaps even more fruitful than only deploying influence agents. Chapter 4 was designed to compare the effect of the Share H 2 O social network intervention with a mass media approach (Redman, Spencer, & Sanson-Fisher, 1990) in which the entire class was exposed to a presentation on the benefits of drinking water. However, these findings were not prominent enough to draw a clear conclusion about which approach was most successful. The mass media intervention was not communicated in an autonomy- supportive manner (Vansteenkiste et al., 2005) and children did not have the opportunity to generate their own reasons for drinking water. The question therefore remains whether all children could have been motivated if the entire class had followed the Share H 2 O training. An approach to investigate this would be to compare the impact of training the entire class simultaneously with training the influence agents only (as done in this dissertation). The Role of Perceived Social Norms Most of the chapters (Chapters 3-5) in this dissertation show the important role of perceived social norms in the Share H 2 O social network intervention. In the following sections, we first reflect on the moderating role of prevailing social norms on the effectiveness of the intervention and then on how the intervention changed the perceived social norms of the children. Moderating Role of Perceived Social Norms Chapter 4 showed that the effectiveness of the Share H 2 O intervention depended on already prevailing social norms among children. First, the intervention was more effective in children who perceived that their classmates were drinking the desirable amount of water before the intervention (i.e., higher descriptive