From what I can gather it sounds like you have a user table that might
look like this. Of course it could have a lot more columns as well...but these are the ones you seem to be dealing with.
User.create({ :name => 'joe', :status => Status.find_by_name('Approved').value })?
It might be better if you removed the 'value' column from the Status model and then use a has_one relationship from User to Status:
# statuses(id, status_name) class Status < ActiveRecord::Base end
# users(id, name, status_id) class User < ActiveRecord::Base has_one :status end