Date of Award

8-2025

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Public Affairs and Administration

First Advisor

Daniela Schrӧter, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Matthew S. Mingus, Ph.D.

Third Advisor

Prentiss Jones, Ph.D.

Keywords

Opioid crisis

Abstract

The opioid crisis presents a wicked problem for public administration. Hundreds of thousands of people have died from opioid overdoses in the United States, and countless others have experienced severe opioid-related physical, psychological, and socioeconomic harms. Countering the opioid crisis has been difficult due to interdependencies across different drugs and multiple pathways for abuse and dependence. Many scholars, health providers, and politicians have called for a broad public health approach to combat the opioid crisis, but the full expanse of what that would entail has not yet been realized. What has been demonstrated is that interactions targeting a single aspect of opioid misuse, such as restricting supply, have not been enough. Yet by and large, this is exactly what state and federal policy responses have continued to do.

This dissertation employed a single case study with embedded convergent mixed methods design to explore how one state, Michigan, arrived at the provisions of Public Acts 246-252 of 2017 as the policy solution to the opioid crisis. Viewing the crisis through a Pragmatist lens, this study approach relied exclusively on secondary data from multiple sources to generate rich description while also enhancing real-world feasibility for time- and resource-constrained public administrators. Quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed in parallel and then merged. Divergence was observed between some of the themes generated from the quantitative analyses and the qualitative Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) study of legislative documents. The results were integrated using the “following a thread” approach, and quantitative and qualitative findings were narratively woven together around similar concepts. Regarding the fit of the quantitative and qualitative data, this integration expanded the understanding for the earlier divergence: The scope of the problem had been contained in the narratives from the legislative documents. This narrative strategy influenced the resulting policy solution by framing the problem such that the prescription opioid supply was oversimplified as the root cause, despite available public health data showing illicit opioids to have been responsible for most overdose deaths.

Access Setting

Dissertation-Open Access

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