Dear all,
I am trying to transfer data from Spss to Mplus. I save the data in Spss in a comma separated format but when I am trying to import it in MPlus I get the following error:
* ERROR
The number of observations is 0. Check your data and format statement.
Data file: MPlus_Trial 1.csv
* ERROR
Invalid symbol in data file:
"1012;386;3" at record #: 1, field #: 1
I don't understand why it considers those symbols as invalid. They have exactly the same format as those in the next lines of my data file. Have you every encountered something similar? How did you solve it?
Thank you very much for your time and attention!
Hello Kalliopi,
As I don't use mplus, this is just a guess: Could it be that the importing program (mplus) is expecting to see variable names as the first record, but the data file contains only values? That would yield an error message similar to what you obtained.
Good luck with your work.
Thank you all for your answers! A colleague recommended an app to me called N2MPlus. It helped me create a file and the error I mention above did not come up again. However I got a new error now
** ERROR
One or more variables have a variance greater than the maximum allowed of 1000000.
Check your data and format statement or rescale the variable(s) using the DEFINE command.
Continuous Number of
Variable Observations Variance
VAR0 4479 269447.628
**VAR1 3003 **********
VAR2 3000 0.434
**VAR3 4480 **********
**VAR4 4480 **********
Any ideas how to deal with it?
Thank you in advance!
Dear David,
I tried that many many times and exactly because it did not work I tried the app.
Hi
> One or more variables have a variance greater than the maximum allowed of 1000000.
This error comes about when your data are producing really large numbers. For example, if you have data on salary the values may be in the 60, 000 to 100,000 range. When Mplus tries to calculate the variance of these values the numbers become really really big, as you need to square numbers to calculate the variance. This can cause problems, so Mplus is asking you to rescale these variables, for example, by dividing salary by 1000. This re-scaling will not effect the estimates, just change the interpretation a bit.
Mark
Thank you for your answer Mark, it is really informative!
I have had similar challenges with converting SPSS files to Mplus. Tried converting to .dat file, etc and couldn't get it to work. For those that do not want to use the N2MPlus, another good option is to convert to .csv file and remove any blanks in Notepad.
See detailed instruction here:
https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/mplus/faq/how-can-i-move-my-data-from-spss-to-mplus/
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