@wells5609 Awesome! You lead me to try something that got me to the answer.
I can’t do exactly what you said cause I needed to do the get_fields call for some other data. But, your answer prompted me to try:
$field = get_field_object($question, 'user_'.$userid, array('load_value' => false));
Essentially adding in the user_ID# instead of passing in FALSE. This did the trick for me. Not sure why I didn’t try that before!
Thanks!