Undergraduate students are increasingly engaging with public health questions and considerations about health inequities and social determinants of health, but very little attention has been devoted to how learners learn to responsibly and effectively navigate complex, population-level data. This abstract provides a reflection and education-focused overview of learning how to explore public health inequalities based on open access datasets through an undergraduate educational lens. Instead of offering any original epidemiological data, this article considers the methodological and conceptual problems students face working with public health data such as scale, interpretation, and ethical responsibility. We focus on how neighborhood-level variables are misinterpreted as risk factors at the individual level, and how framing can be used with caution to not overstretch relationships of causation or reproduce deficit narratives for marginalized populations. By using an educational lens, the abstract underscores the need for interdisciplinary training that blends quantitative logic, social context, and ethical consciousness as elements of undergraduate public health education. In doing so, students are taught how to critically engage with population-level data, leading them to appreciate structural determinants of health disparities while maintaining appropriate analytical boundaries. This strategy also helps to build upon foundational skills in terms of data literacy, public health communication and equity-centered reasoning. Taken together, this work discusses how undergraduate exposure to open-access public health data—combined with guided reflection and conceptual grounding—reinforces students’ capacity to interact critically with health inequities. This approach could prepare the next generation of scholars and practitioners who will be challenged by public health threats with rigor, humility, and social awareness.
December 28, 2025