Overview
Students today often juggle demands from their studies, paid work, caring responsibilities, artistic practice and constant digital availability. Generative AI (GenAI) thus does not enter a neutral student life but an already strained and digitally unbounded situation. It can provide relief, for instance through cognitive support, feedback and control over one's time, but it can also create technostress, evaluation pressure and conflicts over values, norms and integrity.
The project asks under which conditions GenAI becomes a resource for students and when it becomes an additional burden, particularly in interplay with multiple demands, disciplinary culture and institutional conditions. Four research questions specify this: the health dynamics of GenAI in everyday student life, the strain, resource and motivation pathways, institutional, social and disciplinary design factors, and transfer, prevention and governance. Conceptually, it combines Study Demands-Resources theory (SD-R) with Self-Determination Theory (SDT) in an integrated model: GenAI-related demands and resources affect motivation and psychological well-being through the satisfaction or frustration of the needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness. The focus is not on the moral judgement of individual AI use, but on when students experience GenAI as legitimate support, as a grey area, or as a tension with their own performance, disciplinary identity, transparency requirements and assessment culture.
Methodologically, a sequential, integrated mixed-methods design combines 10 to 12 problem-centred interviews, a pilot survey of 150 to 180 students, a daily-diary pilot over 5 to 7 study days, and a co-design workshop. At its core is a contrast between business and music students as two distinct disciplinary cultures; Engineering and Architecture and Social Work are included exploratively.
The project delivers a refined, cross-departmental model, initial empirical evidence on strain, resource and motivation pathways, a minimal prototype «Mindful AI Use in Everyday Student Life», and an evidence-based governance briefing for university management and degree programmes. This creates first building blocks for a preventive, governance-oriented approach to student health that is also transferable to companies, public administrations and education providers, and the basis for a larger follow-up project. The project is funded by the Interdisciplinary Network (IDN) Health of the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
