To meet demands of an accurate analysis of the transverse strength of ships, several methods have been proposed taking into consideration such effects as interaction between lonitudinal and transverse members, variable cross section of beams and shear deformations of deep webs. However, most of them which involve graphical integration procedures are not suitable for numerical computations. In order to simplify the analysis the author presents an approximate method based upon an equivalent beam concept. The coefficients for the variable cross sections and shear deformations of beams are given in formulae and in charts. The results obtained by this method are checked by test results and also by those values computed by the graphical methods, and a good consistency has been found. Furthermore, an experimental work on the measurements of stress distribution in brackets has been carried out, the results of which are compared with values calculated by the wedge theory. Their correlation is satisfactory.