About this Guide

This guide introduces some of the very elementary features of Mplus. It is not about the statistics, and it explains very few models. The main purpose is to give an introduction to some basic commands that perhaps is a bit more structured than the Mplus User's Guide written by Bengt and Linda Muthén.

Lest I be misunderstood, let me clarify that the User's Guide is really wonderful. But it does not start with elementary stuff many users will want to know, such as: How long can variable names be? How do I declare missing values? Such questions are answered only in the final part of the User's Guide. By starting from the beginning, i.e. the creation of data, reading and defining data, and so on, I do hope that this online guide is helpful for some people.

As usual, this guide mainly documents my own attempts at understanding what I can do with a specific software package. I do not aim at comprehensiveness. Perhaps nowhere I am further from comprehensiveness than here. Mplus can do many things, and very complicated things at that. You will find very, very little of all this in this guide.

Thanks

Nearly everything you can find here I have learned through studying the Mplus User's Guide (Version 5) written by Bengt & Linda Muthén. Even though my own guide is supposed to make work easier for me and possibly some others by presenting stuff in what for me is a more accessible way, I am grateful to Bengt & Lisa Muthén and everybody working with them, both for the software and the User's Guide.

Thanks also to Guido Möser, Gießen, who has provided some hints not only about how Mplus works but also about how to write input files.

Links

Links were checked and corrected, when necessary, in August 2017.

• Mplus Website – a fairly obvious site to visit.
• A Website at the UCLA which is, as usual, quite helpful.
• An introduction by Alan Acock (PDF, about 4 MB).

History

July 2011

Started a section on multilevel modelling. It is still an unofficial release.

February/March 2010

Started to write this guide. What you see is an unofficial release.

Back to starting page | Start Mplus guide

About the Author

This page is a process initiated and maintained by

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Ludwig-Mayerhofer
University of Siegen
Faculty of Arts and Humanities
D – 57068 Siegen

Homepage at the University of Siegen

Last update: 06 Aug 2017