The challenges Chinese private college students face in applying their beliefs about ethical behaviour in their academic work

This qualitative study investigates the challenges faced by Chinese private college students in applying their ethical behaviour beliefs to academic work and explores the strategies they adopt in coping with these dilemmas. Guided by the Theory-in-Action (TiA) framework, data were collected from a small but information-rich sample of five recent graduates of three private colleges through semi-structured interviews and reflective narrative writing, and analysed using qualitative content analysis. The findings reveal five key challenges and four major coping strategies. By situating integrity as a relational and contextual practice, the study extends the application of TiA to moral education and highlights how ethical beliefs are negotiated within families, institutions, and society. While limited in scale and explicitly framed as an intensive exploratory study, this study offers in-depth, context-bound insights that enrich theoretical understandings of the belief–practice gap. The findings generate hypotheses for future larger-scale research and provide preliminary practical implications for fostering academic integrity in similar private higher education contexts.