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 Laura Selkirk posted on Thursday, November 04, 2010 - 9:13 am
I am attempting to run an EFA with 90 items on a likert scale of 1-5. When I specify that all of the items are categorical I get the following error message:

"Categorical variable SIMP20 contains 11 categories. This exceeds the maximum number allowed of 10."

I checked my data in SPSS and there are only values within range. My missing value are denoted with a period and I put the syntax line

MISSING = .;

in my syntax to make sure MPlus would know how missing data was formatted. When I delete SIMP20, the same error message shows up for a different variable which also only has values 1-5.
 Linda K. Muthen posted on Thursday, November 04, 2010 - 9:25 am
It sounds like you are reading the data incorrectly, for example, you have blanks in a free format data set. If you cannot figure it out, send the files and your license number to support@statmodel.com.
 Laura Selkirk posted on Friday, November 05, 2010 - 12:49 pm
Dr. Muthen,

Thanks for your reply. I am currently waiting for my license information from UVM (I use university computers because I have a Mac). I think I found the problem. My data was exported from limesurvey and was set to have 11 columns in each variable. Do you think that would cause the issue? Are there any help guides on importing data into MPlus from SPSS?
 Linda K. Muthen posted on Friday, November 05, 2010 - 2:23 pm
The number of columns in the data set must correspond to the variable names on the NAMES list for the data to be read correctly. You should see the SPSS manual to see how to convert an SPSS file to an ASCII file.
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