Over the past two decades, digital platforms and emerging AI tools have become ubiquitous in adolescents' everyday lives. Public debate and much of the research emphasize risks and harms, yet we still know comparatively little about how religion-related digital resources may function as supports for well-being and as resources within resilience processes, as largely experienced in contexts of a polycrisis. Connected to the University of Zurich's Research Priority Program "Digital Religion(s)", this project examines how adolescents (14-18) encounter, interpret, and use religion- or spirituality-related digital content and practices (e.g., short-form videos, messages, apps, creators and micro-publics) and how they describe these as helpful or unhelpful for coping, meaning-making and everyday functioning. Special attention is paid to sociotechnical features that mediate support and authority, including platform logics, recommendation dynamics, design cues, and credibility signals.
The pilot phase involves two small groups (n=5-6 each) recruited from a religious youth setting and a school class. Using a mixed-methods design that combines short diary-based self-observation, group interviews and ethnographic observation, we map adolescents' own vocabularies of "support", their credibility judgments and the ways digital religious resources are integrated into daily routines. Rather than testing causal effects at this stage, the pilot identifies patterns, candidate mechanisms and ethical tensions (e.g., persuasion, bias, and governance of spiritual authority online) to inform a larger comparative study across contexts. The project contributes to interdisciplinary debates in digital religion(s), digital and religious education as well as AI ethics on how faith, spirituality and emerging technologies co-evolve and what responsibilities follow for more equitable, regenerative and compassionate digital futures.