The risk of child maltreatment is heightened during the pandemic due to multiple COVID-19 related stressors, such as physical and mental health concerns, economic stress, challenges in homeschooling, marital conflicts and intimate personal violence, and intensified child–parent relationships. Both parental internal (e.g., parenting styles) and external resources (e.g., social support), and parental perceptions toward stressors will affect how parents cope with these stressors, which may exacerbate or mitigate the risk of child maltreatment. Guided by family stress theory, this article identifies COVID-19 related stressors at the family level, and further elaborates on how these stressors are associated with child maltreatment via parents’ resources, perceptions, and coping strategies. Implications for future practice and research are discussed.

While securing data integrity has been a growing issue with online surveys for over a decade, recent cyber threats to online research, particularly survey bots, have escalated dramatically ( Griffin et al., 2022; Pozzar et al., 2020; Storozuk et al., 2020). Survey bots, also known as automated form fillers, are computer programs that fill out web-based surveys with random responses ( Howell, n.d.). While the exact programs and processes that bot programmers use to code and deploy bots remain largely unknown, they likely mirror those used in chatbot programming common in various customer service sections of businesses and websites ( Kollanyi, 2016). There is an increased risk of bots filling out online surveys, especially when monetary incentives are offered ( Griffin et al., 2022; Nosen & Woody, 2008). At times, studies that do not offer incentives become targets to improve language processing for bots to use on future studies that do offer incentives. In addition, due to the anonymity of respondents and researchers’ lack of individual contact with survey participants, it can be difficult to distinguish whether responses to online surveys are from humans or bots ( Bowen et al., 2008; Mitchell et al., 2020). Furthermore, bot programs become more sophisticated the longer they are deployed, which makes it harder for researchers, particularly those without prior knowledge of bots, to recognize, detect, and prevent survey bots.