RoboBlaster

Quantitative laws? I am not sure what you mean. In science, there are no true laws. There are theories, and within these theories there are tenants which could be called laws, but in reality, science never makes definite statements. In fact "prove" is a very very dirty word and should never be uttered as a result of a scientific study. The reason is that in an experiment, you are basically trying to disprove (disprove isn't such a dirty word) your hypothesis. You compare your data to the data that would show if there was no effect of the independent variable. If the observed effect is close to the null effect, you are given evidence that your hypothesis is wrong. If, however, you see that they are far enough apart, you have evidence that your hypothesis is correct. Because you always test against the null hypothesis, you are never totally 100% sure if the results are because of a true effect or random chance. You can repeat the experiment over and over again to improve the chances that the results are true effects, but you will never 100% prove anything in the scientific method.

As for the quantitative part, quantitative variables are no more or less important than qualitative ones. For instance, gender is a qualitative variable yet it has tremendous import in scientific studies. In the field of physics, there are 4 fundamental forces that are studied. These are qualitative entities. You cannot assign a value to electromagnetism or gravity (sure, they have differeing strengths, but they are independent from each other [at least we think so for now - who knows what the UFT will bring]). Just because a science studies qualitative variables more often doesn't make it "soft." Besides, psychology deals with many wuantitative variables anyway (such as depression scales, age, drug use, IQ, response times, etc.). I can tell you that being a clinical psychology grad student, our stats and research design classes are anything but soft.