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)