As said elsewhere:

Three commonly used software:

- for quantitative data analysis: SPSS, R, STATA

- for qualitative data analysis: NVivo, Miner Lite, Atlas.ti

Personally, I find SPSS easier than the others--and NVivo for qualitative.

I think the best software is for doing it. I confide in objective sampling from finite populations. The focus of actual software is on subjective statistics.

A typical health sciences research will not involve more than simple statistical analyses. Many softwares can do these analyses. They do not call for highly specialized software. SPSS, Minitab, R, SAS, etc. are common and user-friendly ones that may be used.

Stata is preferred by our team. Once you learn the commands it is very powerful and a smooth user interface.