Indigenous Communal Ownership Norms and Psychological Distress Disclosure Among Zambian Market Traders: A Conjoint Experiment on Privacy Boundary Violations and Help-Seeking

The study employs a conjoint experiment to test whether traders' disclosure decisions respond to cues of communal ownership, privacy violations, and help-seeking options. The design uses a before-after-control-impact estimator with a variance structure of between-cluster SD = 6.0, residual SD = 4.5, and intraclass correlation = 0.64. Power was estimated across 2000 design cells. The analysis characterises the operating characteristics of the design under this variance structure. The results indicate that the design achieves 80% power to detect a 5 percentage point effect with 52 clusters. The findings suggest that communal ownership norms create distinct privacy boundaries that traders navigate when deciding whether to disclose distress.