st: St: comparing survey pre- and post- results

[Andrzej Niemierko <aniemierko@PARTNERS.ORG>]

Dear All,
I am trying to evaluate the effectiveness of a mentoring program at our
institution. A random sample of mentees filled in a questionnaire before the
start of the mentoring program. A typical question would be:

Question: To what extent do you agree you personally have achieved the
following in your career?
Career success:
Answers: a) too early to tell b) strongly disagree c) disagree d) neither
agree nor disagree e) agree f) strongly agree g) not applicable.

The same questionnaire was given to a different sample of mentees after the
completion of the mentoring program. Let's say that the distribution of
responses to the above question before and after the program is as follows:

Before: a)1   b)3  c)18  d)31  e)6   f)1  g)0
After:  a)0   b)4  c)11  d)28  e)18  f)7  g)0

Assuming that the question is indeed relevant for evaluating the mentoring
program how can I quantify the difference between the post- and the pre-
distributions of answers? How can I test whether the difference is
statistically significant?

This branch of statistics is a bit foreign to me, and I hope someone can
help.

Thank you,
Andrzej





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