Indigenous Cattle-Kraal Spatial Proximity and Social Support Among Pastoralist Households in Northern Kenya: A Natural-Experiment Estimation of Residential Segregation and Psychological Resilience

Pastoralist households in northern Kenya organise residence around cattle kraals, and the spatial proximity this creates has been treated in ethnographic accounts as a source of mutual aid and psychosocial security. Whether that proximity produces measurable psychological resilience, and whether the association survives the confounding of household wealth, herd size and ethnic affiliation, has not been established. The framework treats residential segregation as a continuous exposure measured by mean inter-household distance within a kraal cluster, and psychological resilience as a latent construct indexed by a small set of validated scales. It distinguishes three mechanisms — routine surveillance and child supervision, risk-sharing in herd loss, and normative obligation to elders — and it states the conditions under which each mechanism would be identified separately from the others. The framework is intended to make the resilience effects of indigenous residential organisation testable rather than assumed.