Psychological distress among early career university teachers: an ecological perspective

Under China’s “Double First-Class” initiative, higher education in mainland China has become increasingly performance-driven, competitive, and metric-oriented. In this context, early career university teachers experience psychological distress not merely as an individual problem, but as a systemic outcome shaped by relational, institutional, cultural, and temporal pressures. Drawing on Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, this qualitative case study examines how factors across the micro-, meso-, exo-, macro-, and chrono-systems jointly shape the psychological distress of early career university teachers in Sichuan Province, mainland China. Data were collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 12 PhD-holding early career university teachers within their first 3–5 years of appointment. Interview data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis to identify patterns of meaning across ecological layers. The findings reveal a cascading pattern of distress, characterized by emotional exhaustion in strained interpersonal relationships, role confusion arising from overlapping professional demands and work-life imbalance, value conflicts under managerialist governance, quantification pressure driven by utilitarian evaluation standards and neijuan culture, and age anxiety as a temporal amplifier of cumulative stress. This study contributes to educational psychology by showing how early career teachers’ distress is produced through interlocking ecological pressures and may become consequential for instructional practices.