Collection of the material

The method of collecting the material for this study differs significantly from traditional apology research. Shariati and Chamani (2010: 1690) note that data for previous studies in apology research has been acquired mostly through role-plays, either face-to-face with someone or through written tasks on paper (e.g. Cohen and Olshtain 1981, Blum-Kulka and Olshtain 1984, Olshtain 1989, Bataineh and Bataineh 2008, Jones and Adrefiza 2017). This approach has its weaknesses, such as possible unnatural behavior from participants, which is why Shariati and Chamani (2010) decided to go for ethnographic observation (similarly to Holmes 1989). This method enables the collection of natural speech, but its downside is that the data collection takes more time and effort. The current study looks at speech in videos which have been produced personally by the speakers. The advantages of this method are that the data is

naturally produced and that the collection of it does not require much effort since the videos are available online. Since these apologies are in video format online, it is likely that they are edited and prepared beforehand. This can be considered a downside if the study focuses on

spontaneous speech. However, this study focuses on the way that the apologies are presented by the speakers, regardless of whether they are edited and prepared prior to filming or not.

In order to gather the correct types of videos, relevant keywords such as “sorry”, “apology” and

“response” were typed on the YouTube search bar. The results were sorted by view count in

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order to find the most viewed apology videos. After this the videos were looked through and the videos that fit into this study’s requirements were identified. These requirements were the following:

a. The creator of the video is a single person, not a group or a corporation. Studying individuals fits the main purpose of this study.

b. The video is uploaded by the original creator. It cannot be a re-upload. It is ideal that the material is from the original source and presented in the way that the original creator intended. Something to note is that a few of the videos that are used as material in this study have been made private or deleted sometime after I already created transcripts and analyzed them. They have been used in this study regardless.

c. The main purpose of the entire video is to seriously apologize for an offense. The video can also only include the apology; it cannot be, for instance, a small part of a vlog (video blog).

d. The maximum length of a video is about 15 minutes. This is mainly in order to narrow down the search results and make the handling of the data easier and faster.

Following the given requirements, 20 videos were gathered for this study: 12 from male creators and eight from female creators. The runtime of all 20 videos is 2 hours and 18 minutes, of which men’s videos take 1 hour and 10 minutes and women’s take 1 hour and 8 minutes. Therefore, even though the number of videos is not quite even for both groups, the runtime of the videos is nearly equal. The lengths of the individual videos vary anywhere between 1-2 minutes to nearly 15 minutes. The 20 speakers in the videos are between 18 and 32 years of age and they are from various countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Sweden. I would like to note that although all the subjects in the data identify as male or female, I consider all other gender identities valid as well. The subjects were selected based on how relevant their video was to the study. If there were potential subjects that identified as something other than male or female, I would still have taken them into consideration, but that was not necessary in this case.

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After gathering the videos, they had to be transcribed into text. The transcription process was done in two different ways. The first approach was manual transcription where the videos were written down manually as the video was being watched through. The second approach was faster and easier, as the automatically generated English captions from the videos (for which they were available) were directly copied to help fasten the transcription process. After copying the captions, they were checked while watching the video in order to clean up the form and correct any mistakes that the auto-generated speech-to-text might have. All the resulting material amount up to 24,755 words: 11,774 for men and 12,981 for women. Below I have provided two samples of the material from two speakers in order to show what the material is like in its raw form.

… I already made a video owning up to that and taking accountability that- the certain environment that I was in, that I grew up in, it, you know, I grew up in the hood and I said that before. I didn't really, you know, wasn't the best place to grow up and and sometimes it was this [mumbles]... I don’t know, it's very hard but I just wanna, I want to apologize and if people want to unsubscribe and not be here for me I totally get it. I wouldn't want to be here for myself either. But I guess this is one of those situations I'm just gonna have to constantly apologize for the rest of my life. I've people who are really close to me that I value are like “hey, this is something that you should really address because like, you know, like address it” so that's why I'm doing it, because I’ve people who love me, people around me watch my videos and my mom, my- even my mom watches my videos. Sometimes I try to like be careful of what I say and in them, she watches all the videos and she'll like tell me stuff like “you know what…” but I just want to express like… I just want to express like I'm just, I'm sorry if I hurt you guys or let you guys down. I totally understand, but once again, I want a 100% own my actions, I want 100%, again, own the the receipts or whatever…

(Speaker M10)

There have been Reddit threads and 4chan threads with hundreds of comments on it of people trying to prove that I'm not trans because I haven't done this or that or, you know, digging up my old pictures and, you know... I'm a strong person, I'm a happy person but to sit here and pretend like it doesn't affect me at all would just be a lie. So the thought that this entire time I've done that exact same thing to someone else and push that off on someone else fucks with me and I'm fucking sorry. From my perspective, knowing what it takes to transition, the tens of thousands of dollars it takes to save up for these surgeries, to take that plunge and to step into that is difficult and to know that at the… this is getting kind of hard to film and I'm fucking frustrated. Having gone through that myself and knowing that [she] went through that and that during the process of [her] doing that, [she]

had this trans person on YouTube making videos saying some of the things that I said is really messing with me and I feel really fucking bad. You know, this whole thing has really taught me a lesson that I should really try to stick to ideas, opinions, policy, rather than like trying to get in someone's head and like make judgements about something that's so

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personal and so nuanced, like. I will say in this moment, [name], I apologize. I'm genuinely, from my core, sorry. (Speaker F3)