The SIGTERM signal is used by system administrators to request a graceful termination of a process. When a process receives a SIGTERM, it has the opportunity to perform clean-up actions such as closing files, releasing resources, and saving state before actually terminating. This is in contrast to SIGKILL, which forcibly terminates the process without any clean-up. SIGQUIT is designed to terminate processes and generate a core dump for debugging purposes, which is not typically used for graceful terminations. SIGSTOP is used to pause a process, not terminate it.