Lone motherhood is often associated to factors that increase women’s risk of developing poor health, such as being unemployed or poor. Employment fosters better physical health by attenuating economic hardship and improving overall well-being. However, employment can also represent an additional stress factor for lone mothers who face the dual role of main caregiver and main earner. Taking a life course perspective, we investigate how employment associate to self-assessed health of lone mothers in comparison to mothers living with a partner. In Switzerland, weak welfare provisions for families, expensive public childcare, and marriage- based taxation translate into a high incompatibility between work and family, in turn resulting in high shares of maternal part-time work. In this context, being a lone mother might be associated with worse health. Our analyses of the Swiss Household Panel (waves 1999-2011) compared lone mothers and mothers living with a partner, suggesting that lone mothers who are out of the labor market, especially those holding an upper-secondary degree, have a higher probability of poor health. We found that lone mothers working full-time were in better health than those working part-time but that the opposite applied to mothers living in couples. We argue that the negative association between health and paid work for lone mothers is the result of intersections between employment, education, and lone parenthood in a context of poor welfare support.

Recent literature evidences differential associations of personal and general just-world beliefs with constructs in the interpersonal domain. In line with this research, we examine the respective relationships of each just-world belief with the Five-Factor and the HEXACO models of personality in one representative sample of the working population of Switzerland and one sample of the general US population, respectively. One suppressor effect was observed in both samples: Neuroticism and emotionality was positively associated with general just-world belief, but only after controlling for personal just-world belief. In addition, agreeableness was positively and honesty-humility negatively associated with general just-world belief but unrelated to personal just-world belief. Conscientiousness was consistently unrelated to any of the just-world belief and extraversion and openness to experience revealed unstable coefficients across studies. We discuss these points in light of just-world theory and their implications for future research taking both dimensions into account.