Crystal Smit

Social Network Intervention 2 43 agents. Third, and related to the previous point, it is important to disentangle the effect from the training itself from the effect of the influence agents encouraging their peers to drink water. An approach for this could be to compare the impact of the training delivered to the whole network to delivering the training to the influence agents (as was done in the current study). Fourth, we focused only on short-term effects of the intervention. Although the results of this study are promising for improving children’s consumption behaviors, a next step would be to replicate this study and to include follow-up assessments to examine potential long-term effects. Finally, our study identified the influential peers by means of five questions about respect, good leadership, identification, and advice seeking. It might be that various peers are influential in different ways with regard to specific behaviors. For example, a child might function as a role model with regard to water consumption, but not with regard to eating healthy, physical activity, smoking, or drug use. In order to fully understand the role of influence agents in health interventions, future research should continue to explore the different types of characteristics (e.g., social status; Rogers, 2010) or personality traits (e.g., self-esteem; Bevelander, Anschütz, Creemers, Kleinjan, & Engels, 2013) that make some individuals more influential than others. For health professionals it is highly relevant to know which characteristics are most important for positive health behavior change among children. In conclusion, the present pilot study was the first intervention study aimed at water drinking that incorporated the social modeling mechanism in conjunction with peer status among primary school children. Findings showed that a social network-based intervention stimulating peer influence on water consumption is a very promising method to improve children’s drinking behaviors. Our findings underline the importance of peers and the social context for health interventions, suggesting a promising avenue for future interventions and intervention research. In addition, we found that a sole focus on promoting water can not only increase children’s self-reported water consumption, but also reduce their SSB consumption.