How is a field's value (rather than its key) obtained? In Drupal 7, I have a page content type that has a field called group (so the machine name is field_group).  The field is a List (integer) field type.

This field might have allowed values as follows:

0|Description 1
1|Description 2
2|Description 3


If I want to return the key of this field for the current page, the following code correctly works:

field_get_items('node', $node, 'field_group')[0]['value']


If the key were set to 1 for this page, the above code would return 1.

However, is there a way to instead return the associated value (e.g., "Description 1," "Description 2," etc.)?

I thought I had a way to return the value already, but I was told yesterday that my previous method was not a good way to get the value (or key) because my previous method may return extraneous data (such as unwanted HTML), when I really just want the raw key/value itself: How is a field&#39;s key (rather than value) obtained?
As you can see, you pass to field_get_items() the $node parameter. This should tell you that this function will return you a value stored in this Entity. The values of your field are stored in the field itself. You can get your options array as following.

$fieldData = field_info_field('field_group');
$options = $fieldData['settings']['allowed_values'];