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This is a part of a Wikipedia article about Julia Shaw, a criminal psychologist who specializes in the topic of false memories and their implications on the criminal justice system. First, I thought that the word "recode" was a typo of "record" but it appears more than once in the text.

Shaw specialises in false memories and how law enforcement can use "tactics [that] may lead people to recall crimes that never occurred".[4] In one of her studies, she stated that in a controlled setting she was able to construct false memories of childhood events in 70% of participants using suggestive memory-retrieval techniques.[2][10][11] The validity of this 70% finding has, however, been criticised by colleagues who recoded the data to conclude 26–30% of participants had false memories (with those with false beliefs without memory details not being counted as false memories in this recoding).[12] Shaw addressed the criticism in a 2018 article in Psychological Science, where she explained that the original coding categorized false beliefs as false memories, in keeping with past research that argued memory and belief are difficult to truly distinguish.[13**

The only definition I found that could fit into this context is...

Psychology., to mentally process (information) again in a different way. (dictionary.com)

...although this kind of wording would signify a very haphazard and unscientific way of arriving at a result of an experiment. People simply "reconsidered"? The scientific method should provide them with tools that pervent them from making arbitrary decisions IMO.

P.S. Also the usage of the word 'conclude' in this way is sort of alien to me. This means simply that 'the study concluded' (the result of the study was thus) right?

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  • It also appears indirectly in "the original coding", which was recoded. The term suggests the preparation of data by computer and not "unscientific". And 'conclude' is a frequently seen word in studies: which come to conclusions. Cambridge Dictionary has "to judge or decide something after thinking carefully about it", and "to judge after some consideration". Commented yesterday
  • @WeatherVane "the original coding" is a big hint, but it's not coding in the computing sense here Commented 9 hours ago

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In the context of scientific studies, "coding" is technical jargon that refers to classifying data. From dictionary.com:

  1. to categorize or identify by assigning a code to.

The "re-" prefix means doing something again, so "recoding" means reclassifying the data obtained during the study. The colleagues didn't agree with how Shaw originally classified the data, and they assigned different codes, which resulted in different conclusions.

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What does the verb "recode" mean in the context of scientific studies?

This is actually jargon more specific to the medical and psychiatric fields rather than the context of scientific studies at large.

In the medical field it is common for assessments to be classified with a code based on something like the ICD-10 list of the World Health Organization. This makes it easier for doctors to communicate concisely even across language barriers. A "code J11" represents "influenza, virus not identified" regardless of whether the doctor normally communicates only in English or Korean or Czech.

Chapter-V of the ICD-10 list specifies "Mental and behavioural disorders" and so these sorts of codes are used in the field of psychiatry. (Or alternatively, the DSM-5 which is a similar code system published and maintained by the American Psychiatric Association specifically focusing on psychiatry.)

As to the context of the Julia Shaw wikipedia article:

The validity of this 70% finding has, however, been criticised by colleagues who recoded the data to conclude 26–30% of participants had false memories (with those with false beliefs without memory details not being counted as false memories in this recoding).

This is essentially saying that Julia Shaw using her judgement as a psychologist classified 70% of cases as applying to one specific code, but her colleagues reviewing the same data and using their judgement found only 25%-30% of cases would apply to that code. They are basically calling her judgement into question given the huge disparity.

So, basically, the words "coded" and "recoded" are synonymous with "classified" and "reclassified" in this context.

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