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Abstract Social Q&A (SQA) services have been growing in popularity among health information seekers. Even though research has paid much attention to a variety of characteristics of SQA services to investigate how people interact with each other for seeking and sharing information, the issues of identity and anonymity in these services that might relate to key user outcomes have been understudied. Such issues are especially important when dealing with stigmatized health conditions or sensitive health-related questions where choices are made about the revealing and concealing of identifying information in SQA environments. In the current study, we identified 110 stigmatized health questions from Yahoo! Answers that contained varied amounts and types of identity information corresponding to a framework developed in the study. We found that there are differences for providing personal contact information in one’s profile when relating identity information in user profiles to identity information in user questions. Questions with a high amount of demographic information in questions tend to receive slightly higher average number of responses and take shorter time to receive the best answer for stigmatized health questions.