Context of Parenting Stress During the Prolonged COVID-19 Pandemic: A BERTopic Analysis of 2020–2023 Online Parenting Forum Data

This study aimed to map out parents' stress throughout the COVID-19 pandemic by analyzing online parenting forum data and investigating the difference between stress and nonstress topics. Data for this study comprised posts written between 2020 and 2023 on Café M, one of the most prominent online parenting forums in South Korea. Five percent of the 368,987 qualifying posts were manually labeled to distinguish stress posts from nonstress posts. This training data was applied to the rest of the data using a logistic regression model to identify 51,916 stress posts as the stress dataset and the rest as the nonstress dataset. BERTopic was conducted on both datasets, revealing 314 and 82 topics (17 and nine topic clusters), respectively. Some topic clusters whose themes were unique to each dataset were presented, and some with shared content. The topic clusters for shared themes were closely related to pandemic parenting, including childcare, pregnancy, and COVID-19 symptoms. The key difference distinguishing stress topics from nonstress topics in these clusters is the accumulation of preexisting vulnerabilities and stressors. This study highlights the importance of recognizing the compounding of stressors during COVID-19 in families and providing appropriate support for them in the post-COVID era, with an emphasis on vulnerable families.