A story of levels

© 2018 CEUR-WS. All rights reserved. Despite being one of the fundamental concepts of multi-level modeling - to the extent of occurring in the name of the discipline - the concept of “level” has no universally agreed upon meaning among multi-level modeling researchers. There is no consensus on what the nature of a level is nor on how levels should be used to organize modeling elements. In this paper, I aim to initiate a discussion on what the options for defining levels in multi-level modeling are and how they could be systematically characterized.