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People often get confuse on which disciplines can be considered as a science. Are those who study English, for example, scientists? What about economists, are they scientists? People believe that only those disciplines included in the so-called "hard" sciences, such as biology, chemistry and physics, should be considered as scientists. 
We will consider a discipline a scientific field if it follows the scientific method in inquiring into issues. What is a scientific method? The scientific method is a process that objectively learn truth about a phenomenon using scientific approaches. Economics also use these scientific approaches for testing economic problem;
i)Identify the problem: The first step of employing scientific method for studying a phenomenon is to identify the problem. Probably, you want to find out how consumers behave when prices of goods and services increases. This becomes the economic problem you want to investigate and that becomes the starting point of the scientific method.
ii) Formulate a hypothesis: Hypothesis is a statement that have not been tested or investigated. For instance, we can formulate that whenever prices fall, consumers will buy more as our hypothesis. This can only be tested after data has been collected and analyzed.
iii) Collection of data: In order to test this hypothesis, you need to collect data. The data collected can either be primary data or secondary data. In the case of primary data, we can collect data from interviews, questionnaires and observation. Secondary data is data collected from already prepared source like government agencies, World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and others. In this case, you have to collect data on consumers; the prices at which they buy goods and services and the quantity of goods and services they buy when prices fall, to help test the hypothesis.
iv) Analyzing the data and obtain results: After collecting the data, the next thing to do is to analyze the data to find out whether it confirms the hypothesis. That indeed when prices fall, the quantity of goods and services increases. Analyzing the data should be done with economic models (Ordinary Least Squares, Generalized Least Squares and others) and economic software's like (Stata, Eviews, Microsoft and others).
v) Generalization: The next step is generalization. Assuming I carried out the test in Tamale my hometown and have been able to establish that the result obtained also applies to other parts of the country. In this case, you can make a generalization that whenever prices fall, consumers buy more all other things being equal, since the result obtained from the study, holds for all parts of the country.
vi) Theory formulation: The last step for your approach is when your result is accepted as a theory in the world. Before your result can be accepted as a theory, other scholars will test your results in different parts of the world with new datasets. If the result proves the same, then it becomes a theory accepted in the whole world. For example, in economics, we have theories like; demand, supply, cost theory, production theory and others.
vii) From theory to law: From theory it becomes a law, when it is popularly use by notable economists and predicts economic phenomenon perfectly and consistently, then it becomes a law. For example, we have laws in economics like; the law of diminishing marginal returns, law of demand, law of supply and others.
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I agree with you as many people get confused since science is very broad of interrelated fields. So, one can also classify economics as one of the applied science. Since their way of presenting issues are the use scientific methods.
yh they uses scientific approach in tackling issues..