Webform value labels for selection items?

jnt: Thanks so much for responding. I'm rather a newbie at all of this,, so am not familiar with some of your terms. I'm not sure what a "boolean" might mean in this context. We seem to be talking about the same thing though, and your notion of recording the bracketed score is exactly what I want. Most often I'll be incorporating rating scales (1 through 5) and the ability to retrieve the data and tabulate scores across surveys is very important. There are conventions for developing such variables in the survey module, and in fact in that module, the availability of a downloadable file which can be read by Xcel is terrificly helpful. What I like in particular about webform though is that I can incorporate hidden variables.

jnt: I thought I'd go back to the survey module and see how they might have implemented this value labeling. I don't know implications for coding, but the user is told: "For select fields only. A list of all options - delimited by semicolons (e.g. red;blue;green). To have different labels from values, use colons e.g. 1:red;2:blue;3:green" Perhaps this not only illustrates the feature but points to an implementation path which would be consistent?

Sounds terrific. How about "scale" (or your "grade").. I like the latter since 5-point scales are endemic in survey research, and if means and st deviations could be computed, that'd be terrific.