Trust Before Usability: An Exploratory Persona-Based Study of AI Acceptance in Higher Education

This dataset accompanies the manuscript "Trust Before Usability: An Exploratory Persona-Based Study of AI Acceptance in Higher Education" and contains anonymized responses from a mixed-methods survey of 104 university students on perceptions of generative AI (usefulness, trust, ease of use, privacy and ethical concerns, and adoption intention), together with coded open-ended responses on desired AI features and accuracy-verification strategies. The package also includes the full survey instrument and the Jupyter notebook reproducing all reported analyses (bootstrap exploratory factor analysis, regression with robustness checks, K-Means persona clustering, and thematic coding with fuzzy-match reproducibility checks).