Radio button values stored as a serialized object?

I want to ask a simple marketing consent question with the choice of either YES or NO. I’m using the radio button input type for this. I would expect the data posted to the Database would just take the value (YES or NO) but instead, it’s posted as some kind of serialised object or array – looks like this a:1:{i:0;s:3:”YES”;} .

Does anyone know why this is, and if there is a way to prevent it? I just want a simple YES or NO value so that when my client exports data they can easily see has and who hasn’t opted in for marketing.

This makes the data really difficult work with