Articulo_3_EN_Doxa_27

Despite being traditionally perceived as a sign of weakness (Mills, 2001), there are studies which show that leaders capable of apologizing for errors committed, are perceived as more progressive leaders than those who do not (Tucker et al., 2006) and even, according to some authors, is a requirement to successfully perform top management (Lazare, 2005). Mills suggests that leaders are humanized through apology, while those who act badly by remaining silent and showing indifference to public opinion are not’ (2001: 115).

For this research, Benoit’s theory of image restoration (1995) will be used as a theoretical reference of the different tools that institutions and people use to try to restore their image in situations in which their reputation is jeopardized. Benoit (1997: 179) lists five strategies in which he differentiates (1) denial, (2) evasion of responsibility, (3) reduction of offense, (4) corrective action, and (5) mortification. Among these, this present study will focus on mortification as it is the tool which involves a greater degree of contrition and acceptance of responsibility for the actor because he/she apologizes for the act committed, assuming the blame for it and condemning his/her actions.

Regarding the existence of similar studies in this respect, McGraw (1990) had already approached the segment of uni-versity students through research in which, through the development of a series of questionnaires, he was able to bet-ter understand the relationship between ideology and the assessment that young people made of accountability and excuses offered by politicians. His work, with a more qualitative character by means of a questionnaire to 98 students, sheds light on the sensitivity of students in this matter; in this case, McGraw himself (1990: 131) recognized the limi-tations of the study in terms of its low representativeness. In the field of politics and in the Spanish context, there are hardly any precedents on the subject, because it is dealt with from the perspective of media impact and its link with crisis communication management (Herrero & Marfil, 2016; Marfil, 2017).

3. Methodology

For the research, a quantitative methodology has been used in which, through an online survey, it was possible to ob-tain a reliable image of the assessment made by Spanish university students regarding apology discourses in politics. To ensure that the sample was probabilistic and representative, a stratification was performed for the number of universi-ty students in each autonomous community, segmented in turn by gender since there are studies that affirm that men and women have different sensitivities to apologies (Schumann & Ross, 2010). The questionnaire was sent via email from their universities to the stratified and segmented student sample, thus the universe has a non-zero probability of being selected, ensuring the weighting of the sample responses of the universe.

With regard to the calculation of the sample, the universe amounted to 1,329,109 university students in Spain from both public and private universities, according to the data available at the beginning of the research by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports relating to the 2016/2017 course (MECD, 2018). For this universe, the calculation of the sample was developed with a confidence level of 95%, therefore, a margin of error of 5%, which is equivalent to a set of 385 survey respondents.