The paper is structured into six sections. Section 2 presents a literature review on the uses of mobile phones by older
adults for social interaction and supportive communication. The section then elaborates on the characteristics of social support
networks of older adults, with the aim of understanding the possible roles of mobile communication in the exchange of
different types of social support. Then, the research questions are formulated. Section 3 explains the methodology and
describes the nationwide representative survey data used to empirically study the research questions. The results are presented
in Section 4 and Section 5 presents the discussion of the results and the implications they suggest, including a comment
on the limitations of this study and possible issues which might be addressed in future work. Finally, in Section 6, the
conclusive remarks are drawn.