Crystal Smit

Chapter 4 88 reasoning is consistent with the contextual-congruence model which suggests that higher levels of congruence between values, beliefs and behaviors across children’s social environments facilitate the internalization process (Spera &Matto, 2007). This may also play a role between the social environment and intervention messages, as the lack of incongruent talk about the target behavior in the social environment is a facilitative condition of media effects (Southwell & Yzer, 2007). Second, we found that children who initially perceived lower injunctive peer norm consumed more water after being exposed to the social network intervention, while children who perceived higher levels of injunctive norm in their environment did not change their water consumption. More specifically, the intervention was not successful among children who perceived that their classmates thought that they should drink water. Previous research has shown that higher levels of injunctive norm can be perceived as a coercive pressure from others to conduct the target behavior (Cialdini et al., 1991). Thus, it could be that in a context without this perceived peer pressure to drink water (i.e., low levels of injunctive norms), childrenmay becomemoremotivated (Ryan&Deci, 2000) to adopt their behavior in accordance with the water promoting message in the social network intervention. In contrast, in a context where they beforehand do perceive high levels of peer pressure to drink water (i.e., high levels of injunctive norms), they could become less motivated to adopt their behavior in accordance with the message. It is important to underline that the current study yielded a conflicting pattern compared to the previous pilot study examining the moderating role of injunctive norms in social network interventions (Franken et al., 2018). More specifically, the study of Franken et al. (2018) found that children who initially perceived higher injunctive peer norms were more likely to change their behavior. A possible reason for this conflicting pattern could be that the Franken et al. (2018) study was conducted on a Caribbean island involving cultural differences regarding social norms and energy intake-related behaviors (Kumanyika, 2008). Further research is therefore needed to determine how exactly the prevailing social norms in the context interacts with the effectiveness of social network intervention.