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