Crystal Smit

Chapter 4 68 others due to their unique position in the network (Rogers, 2010). Deploying these influence agents as advocates of the target behavior (e.g., as role models) can accelerate the diffusion process and behavior change in social networks (Valente & Davis, 1999). There is promising evidence from recent pilot studies that children’s drinking behavior can be improved with such a social network-based approach (Franken, Smit, & Buijzen, 2018; Smit et al., 2016). In these studies, the influence agents were trained to encourage water consumption—as an alternative to SSB—among their peers. In both studies, an increase in children’s water consumption, as well as a decrease in their SSB consumption, was found (Franken et al., 2018; Smit et al., 2016). However, these studies only investigated the effectiveness of the social network intervention by comparing it to a control condition. Thus, the question remains whether this promising social network-based approach is actually more effective than an active control condition based on the principles of mass media campaigns. Moreover, social network interventions utilizing peer influence are assumed to tap into normative behaviors. Research has shown that children do not like to deviate from the group norms and experience a strong need for acceptance, which prompts them to conform to the normative behavior of their peers (Higgs, 2015; Jones & Robinson, 2017; Stok et al., 2016). The literature distinguishes between two types of social norms, namely descriptive and injunctive norms (Cialdini et al., 1991; Reno et al., 1993). Descriptive norms refer to the perception of how most people behave (Reno et al., 1993). For healthy drinking, for example, this would imply that children perceive that their peers drink a certain amount of water. Injunctive norms refer to the perception of what others consider appropriate (Reno et al., 1993). For example, an injunctive norm for healthy drinking would be that children perceive approval of their peers when they drink a certain amount of water. Several studies have shown that both type of norms affect children’s dietary behaviors with regard to the type and amount of food they perceive their peers to consume or approve of (Higgs, Liu, Collins, & Thomas, 2019; Jones & Robinson, 2017; Larimer, Turner, Mallett, & Geisner, 2004; Mollen, Rimal, Ruiter, &