Reactivity beyond contamination. An integrative literature review of video studies in educational research

ABSTRACT The growing interest in video research and new technologies for recording human interaction has stirred debates about intrusiveness and ‘reactivity’ understood as researcher-derived changes in subjects. In addition to a plethora of concepts referring to such effects in extant literature, different ontological and epistemological positions provide contrasting frameworks for interpreting and deciding on methodological guidelines. In this article we discuss these elements, that we have called ‘meta-methodological’, from the standpoints of experimental research, social-constructivism and scientific realism. We combine conceptual analysis and a literature review of video-studies in teaching in order to identify both possible traces of contesting beliefs and to provide a glance at different aspects of ‘reactivity’ that needs to be systematized in the ongoing debates. Whereas the methodological literature underline the importance of such effects, these are rarely reported in the reviewed video studies. Moreover, reactivity is seen as a minor problem in the latter, and we found few instances that validated the effects on the field and on the empirical conclusions. Our article ask for more transparency in field researchers’ judgment about reactivity and mitigating measures.