grep not working as expected

[davidj]

Fellow monks,
I have been scratching my head over this trying to figure out what I am doing wrong. For the life of me, I am not seeing it. I am using grep to test the value of a query paramater. The value IS in the list, but grep is not finding it. I hope I have included all the relevant information below.

The form part looks like this:

<select name="report_type" >
<option value="case_id">case_id</option>
<option value="hosp_alias">hosp_alias</option>
<option selected="selected" value="sender">sender</option>
<option value="receiver">receiver</option>
<option value="date">date</option>
</select>

After selecting any of the option (in this case sender), I do the following in the cgi script:

print "param=" . $q->param('report_type') . "<BR>";
if( grep { /$q->param('report_type')/ } (qw/case_id hosp_alias sender 
+receiver/) ) {
    print "we are getting the list<BR>";
} else {
    print "we are NOT getting the list<BR>";
}

The output I get is this:

param=sender
we are NOT getting the list

At this point I am not modifying in any way the query parameters after they are sent to the script.
If I understand grep correctly, I should be getting:

param=sender
we are getting the list

If I take this part and put it in a simple script, I works correctly:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$p = 'sender';

if( grep { /$p/ } (qw/case_id hosp_alias sender receiver/) ) {
    print "getting the list\n";
} else {
    print "not getting the list\n";
}

output:

getting the list

Why am I not getting what is expected? The value is verifiably in the list. The grep syntax is correct.

As always your assistance is much appreciated.
davidj