Crystal Smit

Chapter 5 96 food when they are in the presence of several peers (Herman et al., 2003). Despite this important role of peers, until recently peers have been relatively overlooked in many interventions aimed at the consumption of water and SSBs for children (Vargas-Garcia et al., 2017). An intervention approach that utilizes peer influence to address health-related behaviors is the so-called “social network interventions” (Valente, 2012, 2015). In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the use of social network interventions in the field of public health (Bell et al., 2017; Campbell et al., 2008; Sebire et al., 2018; Smit et al., 2016; van Woudenberg et al., 2020). At the heart of this approach lies the diffusion of innovations theory, which conceptualizes how individuals can act as change agents to informally diffuse newbeliefs and behaviors in a social network (Rogers, 2010). Based on this premise, interventionists select a subset of individuals as influence agents to initiate the diffusion of the target health behaviors in their social network (Valente & Davis, 1999). Accordingly, in the social network intervention called Share H 2 O , children were selected as influence agents and trained to promote water consumption—as an alternative to sugar- sweetened beverages (SSBs)—among their peers (Franken et al., 2018; Smit et al., 2016, 2020). As reported elsewhere (Smit et al., 2020), the Share H 2 O intervention was effective in increasing water drinking and reducing SSBs, with the effectiveness on water drinking depending on the prevailing social norms in the classrooms. In particular, children with higher perceived descriptive norms and lower perceived injunctive norms reported an increase in their water drinking. The study reported here evaluates the implementation of the Share H 2 O social network intervention. Previous research has mainly focused on the process of selecting the most successful influence agents by investigating the best peer nomination questions and selection criteria to identify them. However, despite the underlying premise of social network interventions that the selected influence agents diffuse the desired behavior in their network, the process of motivating the influence agents to do so has hardly received any research attention (Sebire et al., 2018; Smit et al., 2016). To fill this gap, the current study focuses on the process of motivating the influence