For a variety of elastic-plastic stress fields of plane strain specimens, many research works verified the validity of J-T approach. To generalize the validity of J-T method, however, further investigations are needed for more practical 3D structures than the idealized geometries as plane strain specimens. In this work, selecting two main types of structures such as plate and straight pipe, we perform 3D finite element(FE) modeling, and accompanying elastic, elastic-plastic FE analyses. We then study the validity of J-T application to 3D structures, and present some useful informations for the design or assessment of pipe welds by comparing the stress fields from the detailed 3D FE analyses to those predicted with J-T two parameters.