Ah, thanks for all these lovely responses! I wasn't expecting so many. I will look at all those blogs - I just glanced at one earlier in between family stuff.
I've heard good things about writing retreats/writing in company, and I think my institution does them virtually, so I could look into this.
OnarealhorseIride - I am doing qualitative research in the Social Sciences. I have all my data (I'm working with a very large, pre-existing dataset, but one that is not labelled in a very helpful way for what I am studying). I can't talk to the people behind it - I just have the record of the social activity itself, and some contextualising information. I meet my supervisor fairly regularly but the feedback can be quite high level and I don't always find it very actionable - it's more "You need to be clear what body of work you are contributing to - this is currently falling between two stools". So I understand the criticisms but I am not always sure how to respond. My HoD and my husband are both supportive so I am able to find time to work on it, but it's not always predictable as I need to be very responsive in my job role.
Let's say I am studying the practice of weaving, how we know whether someone counts as a skilled weaver, how they acquire that skill and what this means for someone who wants to learn to be a weaver. And I have a lot of videos of people weaving, the people around them and what they do next. However, everyone in this community is extremely good at weaving - they produce consistent fabric with nice straight selvedges (so I infer that this is considered "good"). Therefore, I am saying that the way to get an insight into social meaning of skilled weaving is to see what happens when it goes wrong, e.g. the weft is too tight and pulls the edges in. Does the weaver start again, adjust the tension dynamically, or say they never wanted a straight selvedge in the first place and they prefer a wavy one? I have done this bit of analysis and can show how they way people respond is linked to their social role and interpreted by others in the light of their social role. This is great but only one chapter. The possible responses to dodgy weaving are all documented in the literature - all I've done is shown how they manifest in this community and link it to social role.
So where to go next to make a PhD-worthy contribution to the social meaning of skill in weaving? It's actually quite rare that things go wrong and how people respond when they do is only part of the story, so maybe I could look at how they head off errors in the first place (maybe they are sensitive to particular cues that their loom is about to malfunction). Or I could look at the even rarer occasions when the error mitigation strategy is not successful (e.g. someone who would normally choose to take their wavy-edged fabric in the market does so, but no-one will buy it) - what is the context in which this happens and what are the consequences for their social standing? I have done quite a bit of reading and exploratory data analysis, but I can't see the shape of the whole thing clearly enough to know which way to jump. Once I do, I think I will be able to write something.
The "so what" is about how people are supported to become skilled weavers in this community, and therefore how can we support people to achieve social competence in general - can we make tacit knowledge explicit so that errors are less likely and mitigation strategies are more likely to be successful?
I know I will never have read enough to know for definite, and I need to tie it down somehow, but it is hard to know how...