I think you are looking for a test of equality of two proportions in paired data. A proper test may be the McNemar test.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNemar-Test
In SPSS, you can check McNemar test under 'statistics' in the crosstabs dialogue. It will provide the proper test for a table using the pre/post measurement.
If you only want to test one proportion, you first need to recode the variable to an indicator variable, e.g. 1 vs. 4 to 5 (i.e., strongly agree vs. all other).
Because you can’t match the pre answers with the post answers, there’s no way to pair the responses, and so there’s no way to use tests designed for paired responses (such as those you mention: McNemar, paired-sign rank, and paired t-test).
Probably the best approach is to use a test of association designed for independent samples. Because you are measuring the same individuals in the two groups, this may be a violation of the independence assumption of the test. But I don’t know any way to adjust for this. This violation should be noted in the methods or results.
This approach will probably have lower power than if you had recorded the identity of the respondents in order to pair the results.
Because you are condensing the responses of a single Likert item into two categories (SA/A vs. N/D/SD), this becomes a nominal variable with two levels * ** .
This leaves you with a 2 x 2 contingency table. Appropriate analyses are chi-square test of association, Fisher’s exact test, or G-test of association. Please be sure you understand the assumptions and interpretation of the test you choose to use.
I also strongly suggest you report a measure of effect size. For a 2 x 2 table, the most common measure of effect size is phi. This statistic is fairly common, and may be more meaningful to the reader than the p-value in this case.
Because your observations aren't paired, you can include all observations. The unequal sample sizes won't be problematic.
** You can think of it as either an ordinal variable with two categories or a nominal variable with two categories. It won’t matter.
*** I probably recommend against condensing your data in this manner. If you leave your responses as an ordinal variable (SD, D, N, A, SA), appropriate tests might include Cochran-Armitage test, Mann-Whitney test, or Kendall correlation.
Best Answer
It looks like you want to do something like principal component analysis and find out two components from these 50 items. A very good technique for Likert data will be conducting Non-linear Principal Component Analysis or Categorical PCA instead of usual PCA. Papers have shown that it works better than usual PCA for ordinal data.
Key papers are from Jacqueline J. Meulman, see e.g. Nonlinear principal components analysis: Introduction and application (Psychol Methods. 2007 12(3):336-58) or PCA with nonlinear optimal scaling transformations for ordinal and nominal data (SAGE Handbook of Quantitative Methodology for the Social Sciences, 2004).