Saving SPSS Data Files when using Mplus

I love Mplus! 

When I first transitioned to using Mplus, one of the challenges I found was using data I had previously stored in SPSS as a .sav file to analyze in Mplus. You are probabaly aware (if you are using Mplus, that is!) that Mplus likes to read in ascii data files like .dat, .txt. or .csv files. In addition, Mplus will generate errors if you include variable names at the top of your data frame in that first row.

There are two main ways I have saved out SPSS data for use in Mplus. One is a manual approach within SPSS and the other is using R packages. Over time I have migrated towards using R (it is also possible to use "point-and-click" GUIs like JASP) because I can write a script that is relatively portable and produces very few errors.

Here are two videos that demonstrate examples