Form Designer - Drop-Down List Component

I am using the form designer and have a drop-down list component (Select component) and have added a bunch of data source values i.e. The label column (AKPRIS), the value column (1). My question is can you store a value as an integer because when I run the workflow there is no value stored, it just outputs “” - an empty string. I have tried putting the integer in quotes i.e. “1” but the output looks like this: “"0"” (there is a forward slash after the first quote and a forward slash of 0 - for some reason the html on this page edits those symbols out)