Crystal Smit

Chapter 4 86 needed to explore this possibility, along with replication studies over the years to shed more light on this reasoning. Nevertheless, it is in line with our expectations that when peers communicate about the benefits of drinking water—as an alternative for SSB—it could be an effective strategy to prevent children from consuming SSB. This effect was found on the short term and compared to the control condition without an intervention. However, the question remains why the difference between the social network intervention and the active control is not so pronounced. It could be that the benefits of drinking water presented to the children in the active control condition were convincing enough for the children, even when the research assistants communicated them. These benefits were formulated based on short-term outcomes (e.g., “Drinking water helps you concentrate better at school”) as they are generally considered to be more motivating than long-term consequences (Chandran & Menon, 2004). It is therefore possible that the framing of these messages itself was already strong and convincing, irrespective of the sender. However, the findings suggest that when these benefits are communicated by peers, the effects are less short-lived, given that a marginal difference was found between the social network intervention and the active control condition at T3. Nevertheless, more research is needed to further investigate this. Altogether, the findings of this study suggest that the Share H 2 O social network intervention can be fruitful for schools specifically targeting SSB consumption. Contrary to our expectations and a previous pilot study (Smit et al., 2016), we did not find that the social network intervention was effective in increasing water consumption in general. One reason for this finding could be that the general opinion about water drinking has changed in the past years. Our pilot study was conducted four years ago, and meanwhile, a great deal of (media) attention has been paid to the health benefits of drinking water, including the environmental consequences of drinking SSB instead of water (i.e., plastic soup). For example, by the national organization Jongeren Op Gezond Gewicht [Youth at a Healthy Weight] (AD, 2016; JOGG, 2020) that focuses on changing the water drinking norms