Reply to the following peer discussion:

There are several kinds of software available for the researchers that they can use to perform different activities related to their research. The selection of a particular research software for a study depends on the objectives of the research and the nature of data to be analyzed for the research (Jacobsen, 2020). The most common examples of research software include the software for conducting data analysis. Two of the most popular data analysis software include SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science) and NVivo. Both of these tools are used for analyzing different kinds of data. What excites me most about using these research tools is the fact that they can help a researcher in organizing and performing analysis for the research. These two activities are very important in determining findings and interpretations are made based on these activities (Tie et al., 2019).

As mentioned above, the selection of a research software depends on objectives of study and nature of data. There are two main kinds of data including quantitative data and qualitative data. The quantitative data consists of numbers or data expressed as certain range, amount, or quantity. The key characteristic of quantitative data is that the arithmetic operations can be used for such data (Haas & Hadjar, 2020). The qualitative data consists of non-numerical data such as figures, text, audio, etc. The quantitative software is used for analyzing quantitative data and qualitative software is used for analyzing qualitative data (Cypress, 2019).

I would select the software to utilize in my research project based on the objectives of research and nature of data that I want to collect. For example, I may want to study the relationship between the variable A and variable B, and I decide to collect quantitative data for my analysis (Tie et al., 2019). I will select SPSS software to perform data analysis because it is suitable for quantitative data analysis and it is able to perform the correlation analysis.