Mplus Users Guide v6.. - Muthén & Muthén

CHAPTER 17Although y5 is assigned a starting value of 0.0 in the beginning of theBY statement using the list function, y5 is assigned a starting value of0.5 later in the statement. The program uses the last specification.If a variable is mentioned more than once on the right-hand side of a BY,ON, or WITH statement or in a list of variances, means, or scale factors,the program uses the last value it reads. This makes it convenient whena user wants all of the starting values in a list to be the same except for afew. The same feature can be used when fixing values. For example,f1-f4@1 f3@2;fixes the variances/residual variances of f1, f2, and f4 at one and fixesthe variance/residual variance of f3 at 2.This feature can also be used with equalities, however, the variable fromthe list that is not to be constrained to be equal must appear on a separateline in the input file. In a line with an equality constraint, anything afterthe equality constraint is ignored. For example,f1 BY y1-y5 (1)y4y6-y10 (2);indicates that the factor loadings for y2, y3, and y5 are held equal, thefactor loading for y4 is free and not equal to any other factor loading,and the factor loadings for y6, y7, y8, y9, and y10 are held equal. Thefactor loading for y1 is fixed at one as the default.LABELING THRESHOLDSFor binary and ordered categorical dependent variables, thresholds arereferred to by using the convention of adding to a variable name a dollarsign ($) followed by a number. The number of thresholds is equal to thenumber of categories minus one. For example, if u1 is an orderedcategorical variable with four categories it has three thresholds. Thesethresholds are referred to as u1$1, u1$2, and u1$3.598