Just sharing my experience of doing thematic analysis for my in-depth interviews conducted:

When conducting in-depth interviews for a qualitative study on school stakeholders, i tried to compose the responses in spoken language -verbatims and then to transcripts. Well ,with a little of my experience of qualitative research, can suggest a few approaches handle large datasets in qualitative studies, please note that it requires the following for effective management:

- Guys methodically classifying unprocessed data (e.g., coding transcripts in qualitative data analysis programs such as Atlas.ti or NVivo)- I have personally used Atlas ti and personally loved it. (becos of the web version)

- later considered dividing data into digestible categories using early coding frameworks.

The next challenging phase needs more focus- please note how it was handled..... The categories were iteratively refined to prevent redundancy and data saturation.