The social class position of complex modern families in Understanding Society March 22, 2021 An enduring issue when measuring parental social class is how best to represent households (see Erikson, 1984). Dual earner families are now widespread and non-traditional family structures are common. A distinctive advantage of the household focus of Understanding Society is that it collects data from non-resident parents and from adults who join the household (e.g. new partners and step-parents). The purpose of this research is to explore whether information from a wider range of parental figures can be used to more effectively represent the social class position of children and young people in contemporary families. In this paper, we examine a synthetic cohort based on Understanding Society household members those who completed the youth questionnaire in the first wave of the study. We explore the patterns of response among non-resident and newly resident parents. Based on this exploratory analysis we consider the potential for including additional parental figures in household measures of social class to be used in studies of inequalities in childhood and youth. This paper will also demonstrate the use of tools (e.g. Jupyter Notebooks) and principles (e.g. literate programming) which offer the opportunity to maximise the transparency and reproducibility of research using Understanding Society. Understanding Society Changing Families conference 22nd to 26th March 2021 Online https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/2021/02/11/changing-families-conference-registration-now-open https://www.understandingsocietyconference.co.uk/speakers/dr-chris-playford/