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This paper reports the results of a comparative study carried out with populations from two distinct cultural environments: kibbutz and city raised children in Israel. The study examined how perceptions and responses to television differ across social environments and how children's perceptions of, and reactions to, television may affect aggressive behavior differently in different social and cultural environments of the same society. Subjects--first and third graders from two public schools and two kibbutzes--were interviewed three times at one year intervals, and 158 children of the original sample were interviewed in all three waves. Findings of the study showed that among city children there was a significant positive relationship between television violence viewing and amount of aggressive behavior, although among kibbutz children there was no detectable relationship between amount of exposure to media violence and aggression. It is suggested that a number of factors associated with growing up in a kibbutz mitigate the effect of television violence viewing on the development of aggressive behavior. (53 references, 2 end notes, and 12 figures) (CGD)

Children's social and cultural environments may affect their perceptions of the reality of television violence. One of the problems in measuring the importance of societal variables is the difficulty in finding children whose social environments have differed for most of their lives in well prescribed ways. An exception to this are kibbutz- and city-raised children in Israel who represent different social environments in the same society. Subjects were 112 city children and 64 kibbutz children in first and third grades. Interviews with the children at three 1-year intervals provided an overlapping longitudinal design with data on first through fifth graders. Each year the children were interviewed in two group sessions. Children chose two programs they watched from a list of current programs and stated how often they watched them. The violence of the programs was rated and thus a child's television violence viewing score was derived. Identification, aggressive character identification, overt aggression, peer popularity, and aggressive fantasy were also measured. Among city children a significant positive relationship was found between television violence viewing and amount of aggressive behavior. Relations between exposure to media violence and aggression were not obtained from kibbutz children. Mitigating effects of television exposure for kibbutz children may have included patterns and amount of viewing, group viewing, powerful peer group norms, and the lack of popularity of aggressive children. (ABL)