There are no invalid values. The user could have anything they want in the race/gender fields. They just need to tell us what those values are. That is what the combos are for. You bring up a good point about checking for duplicate values. I don't check to see if the user puts in:
1 = white and
1 = Asian

I think I'll go do that now thanks.

>It seems to me that the gender/race fields are fairly important in your >database. If you don't have a static list to validate against, how do you know >when you encounter either an invalid value or a duplicate value.