Which test to use

[skeeter09]

I have done a study with 40 participants [within-participant design, no control group] and need help with which test to use for analyzing the data.

The study was basically a questionnaire (for my degree project) which begins with asking demographic questions- age, gender etc.

About the questionnaire: it has 24 statements, where participants have to say whether they agree or disagree on a scale of 1 (highly disagree) to 5 (highly agree) e.g. Do you like watching movies? The statements are based on 4 different categories.

Participants actually answer each question twice- their first answer asks them to think about their opinion before they began their higher education, then they rate the statement again thinking about their opinion right now. Then the independent variable is the number of years the participant has spent in higher education (undergrad and above levels)

I wanted to see whether there were differences between the scores people give between the before education and current opinion. I used a paired t test for this to compute the differences- by adding the scores to get means for each of the 4 themes of questions.

I want to know which test to use to look at the relationship between the independent variable [the number of years in higher education] and how much the scores change between the two times participants answered the 24 questions.

If you need more information please feel free to ask, any help is really really appreciated! Thanks.

[teresa]

I would use a repeated measures ANOVA, with a two level factor for the coupled answers and years in higher education as covariate.