Record Type.
A record that has a consistent logical structure. In files that include
different units of analysis , for instance,
different record types are needed to hold the different variables. For
example, one record type might have a variable for income in one column and
another record type might have a variable for household size in that same
column. The codebook will describe these different structures and how to
determine which is which so that you can tell your statistical software how
to interpret that particular column as income or household size.
Recode