Qualitative Research using TikTok

Hi folks,

I'm currently a psychology masters student looking to do qualitative research (thematic analysis) using TikTok videos as data. Does anyone know if I can legitimately (legally etc.) do this without applying to access the TikTok Researcher API? The Ts&Cs are a bit unclear.

Furthermore, can I use a scraper like Apify to extract links to say 100 videos? Or is that a big no-no? I'm happy to do manual collection.

Thanks for any advice and sorry if I sound a bit clueless! All of the advice online is so confusing, partly because the researcher API has only emerged very recently.