FYI: this happens for any of my fields that are based on a “real” pick list. PrepType doesn’t seem to be impacted. Maybe because it is based on its own table and doesn’t use the same title / value pairing method(?)
Thank you for your report and for how well it is formatted!
This is a known behavior at this time, which is described in ticket #7554 on GitHub. I’ve added your report to this, but we are looking to address this in the future. Your report pushes this up in our prioritization process, so thank you for reaching out!
To make this consistent in the short term, this requires you to set the pick list item ‘Value’ to the same contents as the ‘Title’ field. The difficulty here is that you would need to also update the database records so that the value in the assigned field (e.g. :agent: Title) matches the new pick list item value.
If you’d like us to do this for you since you are hosted on Specify Cloud, just let me know! It just takes us a few minutes behind-the-scenes to perform this update. I am hopeful a permanent solution for this discrepancy is on the horizon.
Sorry it took so long for me to get back to this! I have a couple questions…
Does the ‘Value’ allow for spaces now? IIRC, Sp6 documentation used to recommended not putting spaces in ‘Value’.
Would ‘Value’ allow characters, like periods? I have a picklists for Qualifier and Addendum where the ‘Title’ should be things like “sp.”, “aff.”, “sp. inq.” — I noticed these fields are also producing the stored ‘Value’ when used in labels. I could code the formatting into the report expression, but I don’t want to mess with it if the ‘Value’ can simply be updated to match ‘Title’.
The catch is that if you change a Value in the Pick List Editor, Specify does not cascade that change to your existing records.
Because the database stores the literal string, those records will essentially “unlink” from the pick list. In the form view, the field might appear as invalid because the existing data no longer matches any available option in the list.
To fix this, you have to manually reconcile the data using one of these two methods:
Batch Edit Use the Query Builder to find all records containing the old (now invalid) value, then use Batch Edit to overwrite them with the new one.
SQL: With direct database access, you can run an UPDATE statement to change the values globally. I can assist you with this if needed!
System Information (v7.11.4)
I am hopeful a permanent solution for this discrepancy is on the horizon.
Use the Query Builder 
to find all records containing the old (now invalid) value, then use Batch Edit to overwrite them with the new one.