The Psychology of Working Students: A Scoping Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This study employed the PRISMA-ScR guidelines to conduct a scoping review of the psychological experiences of working university students.  Through thematic clustering and synthesis of 42 peer-reviewed empirical studies, it clearly delineated six core psychological research areas: work-study interface processes, resources and support, health stress and recovery, academic engagement and performance, career development and employability, and identity and social relationships.  This study is the first to clearly outline these areas, revealing a stronger and more consistent association between work-study interface quality and support systems compared to simply the intensity of employment on psychological outcomes. It provides the most comprehensive knowledge map and structured integration framework to date for the highly fragmented field of working university student psychology research, while also highlighting the severe lack of longitudinal designs, multilevel analyses, and intervention studies, thus indicating priority directions for future theoretical integration and practical interventions.
The topic of this paper is highly relevant to contemporary higher education issues, the research questions are clearly defined, the methodology adheres to the highest international standards for scoping reviews, the search strategy is transparent and reproducible, and the data extraction and thematic synthesis processes are relatively standardized. The resulting six areas demonstrate good generalizability and explanatory power, meeting the journal's academic requirements for a high-quality scoping review. However, while the issue of theoretical fragmentation in existing research is repeatedly mentioned, it is not adequately addressed through theoretical integration attempts.  Quality control and bias assessment of the included literature are significantly lacking, and there is a serious deficiency in the discussion of sources of heterogeneity, particularly cultural and institutional background differences. The policy implications and intervention suggestions of the research conclusions are rather general and lack operational pathways. Overall, while the scientific value of this paper is clear, its theoretical depth and critical analysis are somewhat weak.  It is recommended that the authors make substantial revisions addressing these core deficiencies before resubmission.

Main Issues

Although the article repeatedly emphasizes the highly fragmented nature of existing theoretical perspectives in the literature, the text fails to propose any integrative conceptual framework or meta-theoretical model to unify different approaches such as the Job Demands-Resources model, boundary theory, role conflict theory, resource conservation theory, and social identity theory. This results in the review remaining at the level of phenomenon description and domain enumeration, failing to substantially advance the long-standing problem of theoretical fragmentation in this field, severely weakening the study's theoretical contribution.
The 42 included studies are of varying quality, with some having extremely small sample sizes, questionable reliability and validity of measurement tools, and a dominant reliance on cross-sectional designs. However, the article completely fails to conduct any form of research quality assessment or evidence strength grading, nor does it discuss or perform sensitivity analysis on potential systematic biases introduced by low-quality studies, significantly impacting the credibility and robustness of the review's conclusions.
While the search strategy was limited to title fields to improve specificity, this significantly sacrificed sensitivity, likely omitting a large number of important psychological empirical studies that used core constructs such as work-study interface, boundary management, and role conflict as main variables but did not explicitly use direct demographic terms like "working students" in the title.  The search completeness suffers from systematic flaws.
The evidence supporting the core conclusion that work-study interface quality is superior to employment intensity relies primarily on scattered findings from a few studies. However, the article does not systematically present a comparison of the strength of evidence supporting and refuting this conclusion, nor does it assess potential publication bias and selective reporting, resulting in a lack of persuasiveness for this conclusion.
Although it explicitly states that cultural and institutional background differences are important moderating variables in understanding the psychological experiences of working students, the vast majority of included studies are from Western countries. There is almost a complete lack of discussion on the psychological characteristics and mechanisms of working students in non-Western cultural contexts, particularly in developing countries or the East Asian Confucian cultural sphere, severely limiting the global generalizability and theoretical extrapolation value of the research conclusions.

Secondary Issues

The search strings listed in Table 1 are highly inconsistent across different databases, with some Boolean logical connectors used confusingly and with significant redundancy, making it difficult for readers to reproduce the search process.
The text repeatedly mentions the use of generative artificial intelligence to assist in text generation, but fails to clearly specify the scope of use, the model of the tool used, the prompt strategy, and the degree of human editing, as required by journal policy, resulting in a lack of transparency. The keyword list includes both "work-study conflict" and "work-study facilitation," but fails to include more widely used terms in current literature such as "work-school conflict," "work-school facilitation," or "student employment," which negatively impacts the discoverability of the literature.
The discussion of natural experiment studies related to COVID-19 is overly brief, mentioning only one article and failing to systematically review the potential systemic changes in the psychological experiences of working college students before and after the pandemic, missing an important opportunity to reveal the impact of macro-contextual shocks on this group. We recommend citing Xu, C., Wang, X., & Zou, Y. (2023). Exploration of college students' psychological problems based on online education under COVID‐19. Psychology in the Schools, 60(10), 3716-3737. https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.22955
Although the future research directions proposed in the conclusion section are broad, most suggestions remain at the level of common expressions such as "more longitudinal studies are needed" and "more intervention studies are needed," lacking specific judgments and prioritization of the most urgent theoretical gaps, methodological innovations, and priorities for specific subgroups.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The topic of the manuscript is timely, relevant, and underexplored from a psychological perspective. Adherence to the PRISMA-ScR guidelines is appropriate and clearly documented. The inclusion of a JBI critical appraisal is a particular strength, as this is still relatively uncommon in scoping reviews, and the corresponding tables are transparent and well organized. Overall, the manuscript is well structured, logically organized, and written in clear academic language. The authors demonstrate a strong familiarity with the field, and the reference list is broad and up to date.

 

The reviewed literature is highly diverse, and while multiple theoretical frameworks (e.g., JD–R) are presented side by side, the manuscript would benefit from a clearer theoretical integration.

Relatedly, the boundaries of psychology appear at times to be defined rather broadly. Although the authors explicitly frame the review as psychologically focused, several included studies are more strongly rooted in educational research, sociology, or policy-oriented perspectives. This is not necessarily a limitation, however, greater reflexivity would be helpful. Specifically, the manuscript would benefit from a clearer discussion of what qualifies as a psychological variable in this review and where the authors intentionally draw (or blur) the boundary between psychology and adjacent disciplines in an interdisciplinary field.

The search strategy rely primarily on title-field searches. A clearer and more explicit justification for this decision would strengthen the methodological transparency of the review. In particular, the rationale for prioritizing title-field searches, along with a discussion of the associated trade-offs (e.g., precision versus coverage and potential omissions), would ideally be articulated in the Methods section itself, rather than only being addressed retrospectively in the Discussion or Conclusions.

The Results section is very detailed and comprehensive; however, it occasionally reads as predominantly descriptive.

With regard to the Discussion section, it may be helpful to ensure a clear distinction from the Results section. The discussion should primarily focus on interpreting and evaluating the findings rather than reiterating them. In particular, the authors could strengthen this section by explicitly structuring it around:
(a) a concise summary of the key findings,
(b) their theoretical interpretation and contribution to the existing literature, and
(c) the broader implications for research, institutions, and practice.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf