Indigenous Age-Grade Initiation Rites and Adolescent Risk-Taking in Kenyan Secondary Schools: A Regression-Discontinuity Estimation of Ritual Cohort Exposure and Delinquency

Because no observational data are available for this analysis, the paper characterises the operating characteristics of the proposed before-after-control-impact estimator under a declared variance structure (between-cluster SD = 6.0, residual SD = 4.5, intraclass correlation = 0.64). Power was estimated across 2000 design cells spanning cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points. The analysis indicates that 56 clusters are required to detect a 5-percentage-point effect at 80% power, and it shows how the minimum detectable effect declines as cluster count rises. The regression-discontinuity framework offers a defensible identification strategy for ritual cohort exposure, but that its feasibility in Kenyan secondary schools depends on cluster availability that exceeds what most current research infrastructures can supply. The contribution is a methodological and design-theoretic one: it specifies the conditions under which the ritual-cohort question can be answered credibly, and it identifies the boundary conditions that any future empirical study must confront.