Well – I sort of solved this, but I’m still curious as to how to parse the above string. To get around this I used…
global $wpdb;
$query = "
SELECT DISTINCT post_name
FROM $wpdb->posts
WHERE post_title LIKE 'request_status'
";
$result = $wpdb->get_row($query, ARRAY_N);
$field_object = get_field_object($result[0]);
$status_array = $field_object['choices'];
this gives an array of choices from the field object instead of trying to read them from the database
