Objective: Academic elite migration has become one of the most pressing strategic challenges facing higher education systems, particularly in contexts characterised by structural constraints. Emerging evidence suggests that this phenomenon is directly linked to the erosion of psychosocial resilience: elites with sufficient resilience resources tend to remain even under structural limitations, whereas the depletion of these resources creates conditions conducive to emigration. However, the existing literature has largely adopted single-level approaches, focusing primarily on individual attributes and neglecting complex multi-level interactions. Moreover, while hope has been studied within the psychological capital framework, its role as an institutionally embedded mechanism remains underexplored. Accordingly, this study aims to develop a multi-level, context-sensitive understanding of academic resilience, with particular emphasis on hope-building as a strategic lever for enhancing talent retention in Iranian higher education.
Materials and Methods: This study adopts a qualitative research design grounded in an interpretive paradigm. The study population comprised academic experts from five leading universities in Tehran, selected through purposive and snowball sampling. Inclusion criteria for faculty required a minimum of five years of academic membership and supervisory experience; for postgraduate students, enrolment at the master's level (third semester or above) or doctoral level and direct experience of occupational uncertainty. A total of 27 participants were interviewed using semi-structured protocols comprising six thematic axes and 18 guiding questions. The interview guide was validated in two stages: expert review and pilot testing. Data collection continued until theoretical saturation was reached (after the 23rd interview). All interviews were fully transcribed and analysed using Braun and Clarke's (2006) six-phase thematic analysis framework in MAXQDA 2022. Rigour was ensured through the four criteria of Lincoln and Guba (1985): credibility (inter-coder agreement κ = 0.79; member checking with five participants); transferability (thick description of participants and context); dependability (full audit trail in MAXQDA); and confirmability (direct quotations with participant codes).
Results: The findings reveal that academic resilience is a dynamic, multi-level phenomenon shaped by the interaction of four layers. At the individual level, resources such as self-efficacy, strategic hope, and psychological flexibility are critical, but they do not operate independently, they are strongly conditioned by institutional environments. At the institutional level, governance quality, transparency, and perceived fairness are key determinants. At the socio-cultural level, peer support networks, role models, and a sense of belonging to the academic community serve as important sources of meaning. The innovative finding of this study is the identification of a fourth layer "national-civilisational identity" encompassing a sense of belonging to Iranian scientific society, pride in academic identity, and a felt responsibility towards national development. This layer, largely absent from Western resilience models, plays a decisive role in retention motivation within the Iranian context. A qualitative comparison of the two groups revealed that themes related to institutional governance reform were more prominent in faculty discourse, while themes related to immediate occupational security and self-efficacy were more salient in postgraduate students' accounts, a pattern rooted in their different positions within the academic structure. The concept of hope-building was identified as a cross-level bridging mechanism functioning as motivation at the individual level, trust-building at the institutional level, and meaning-making at the cultural level.
Discussion and Conclusion: The study yields three theoretical contributions: (1) extension of Ungar's (2022) multi-level resilience model with the addition of a national-civilisational identity layer applicable to culturally embedded contexts; (2) conceptual differentiation between individual hope and institutional hope-building; and (3) identification of "psychological security" the sense of being seen, valued, and heard as a dimension independent of economic security. Practically, the findings advocate for integrated, multi-level talent retention strategies combining governance reform, social support networks, and hope-oriented institutional narratives. Principal limitations include the geographical focus on five Tehran universities, the cross-sectional design, and the absence of perspectives from emigrated elites. Future research should pursue longitudinal designs, inter-city comparisons, and quantitative validation of the proposed four-layer model.