It would help to have some sample code but I would assume that your dd list looks something like this
<select name="selCountry">
<option value="24">Country Name 1</option>
<option value="25">Country Name 2</option>
</select>
in this case in a post $_POST['selCountry'] would equal the selected "value" of the dd list and that is what would be posted to the database. If your database is set up in normal form this would be correct because that would then refer to the primary key of the countries table. If you want the actual country name stored in the inserted record then you will probably want to put the country name in the value attribute of the <option> tag.
Unsolved 
